Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (7 page)

The connection faded. Time passed and I reconnected to my artificial body. I sat for an hour in my chair feeling as if on the point of death and slowly, ever so slowly, brought myself back to my world.

"Harriet," I said, my voice grating.

"I'm here," she replied from very close by.

"It seems our search must end because the Client thinks the danger from the Polity and the Kingdom is too great," I said, testing the words out loud for their veracity.

"The search is over," said Harriet, and there seemed a lot more meaning behind her words than plain parroting. She asked, "You have the coordinates?"

I looked around at her. She was standing right beside my chair and seemed far too eager and interested for my liking. I suddenly knew, with absolute certainty, that to supply her with those coordinates would put me in immediate danger. How did I know? I'm not sure, but it seemed to me the old Harriet was right back—the one I trusted to complete a mission for pay, but no more than that.

"The coordinates have been sent, but not to me," I lied, now sitting upright. "Tank has them."

Harriet swung round to gaze at the object concerned and seemed about to say something more when the drag of the ineffable took us, and the
Coin Collector
entered U-space. I stood up, Harriet swinging her attention back toward me. I did not know how far we would have to travel to reach the Client's location but, this being an ancient prador vessel, I knew it would probably have to drop out of U-space to cool off, and I felt that on those occasions I would have to watch Harriet very closely.

During the first time the
Coin Collector
surfaced from U-space I was prepared, but Harriet seemed to go into that childlike lost puppy phase and showed no sign of acting against me in any way. I even gave her some very dangerous openings—ones that might have resulted in me ending up in pieces on the deck—but she ignored them. Perhaps I had been deluding myself about her? Perhaps I was so used to what had seemed to be her mental decline that my suspicions had only been aroused by it ceasing and reversing? I decided thereafter to take some simple precautions when around her, like always carrying my two weapons, but no more than that. She deserved at least some of my trust, and I had work to do.

The Client had summoned me to it and perforce I had to go, but its orders were no more complex than a summons, and that gave me some freedom of action. I started with the thetics, wiping their base programming and designing something of my own. I needed them to be able to carry out certain instructions and, most difficult of all, I needed them to be able to continue carrying out those instructions even if I ordered them to do otherwise. The simple reality was that in close proximity the Client would be able to seize complete control of my mind and thus, through me, the thetics. I needed them to continue, to give distraction, to give me a chance....

The second time we surfaced from U-space Harriet came and found me in the Captain's Sanctum, deeply internalized, trying to gauge what resistance I had to the Client's control of me, if any at all. She could have killed me then because I was completely vulnerable what with most of my nervous system shut down. Instead she just walked over to stand before me and, as I returned to a normal state of consciousness and responsiveness, she spoke.

"There's something you need to see," she said.

"What?" I asked.

She just turned around and headed back toward the door. I weighed pros and cons as I stood up, then I decided to follow her. It struck me as unlikely she was leading me somewhere so as to attack me, since she could have done the job just then. She waited outside the sanctum beside the scooter I had last used to get here, dipped her head toward it, then turned and set off along the corridor. I mounted up and followed, and with a glance back she increased her pace. She led me into the cargo section of the ship, which was a place I did not often visit, then to a wide square door into a particular hold space. As I dismounted I recognized this door at once, but kept my own counsel as she nosed the control beside it to send it rumbling and shuddering to one side.

I followed her in and surveyed my surroundings as the lights came on. The space was enormous and the cargo it contained had not changed much over the years since I had last been here. The large first-child who had been the captain of this ship rested in one corner like a crashed flying saucer, most of its limbs still intact but now one of its claws having dropped away. Further along one wall from this prador corpse, second-children had been stacked like, well, crabs on a seafood stall. This stack had collapsed on one side and, noting some movement there, I walked over. As I approached an eight inch long trilobite louse scuttled out, heading straight for my legs. I kicked it hard, slamming it into the wall above the stack of second-child carapaces.

"It's because of the ship recharging with air," I said. "There must have been ship louse eggs somewhere, and moisture in the air must have reversed the desiccation of these." I gestured to the dead before me, including a mass of third-children and smaller prador infants piled in the further corner.

I hadn't seen anything but dead ship lice aboard when I returned to consciousness here a century ago. Then the ship entire had been almost in vacuum, and when I first ventured down here the erstwhile crew had been vacuum dried. Gradually the ship's automatic systems had recharged the whole vessel with air, but it had taken decades.

"The lice are unimportant," Harriet intoned, her seriousness undermined when she had to kick away a louse trying to crawl up her leg.

"I've seen all this," I said, gesturing around. "I know that the Client slaughtered the prador aboard. So what, the prador slaughtered its entire species." I didn't mention how the way the corpses had been sorted and neatly stacked always bothered me. Had the Client kept these as a food source? Could it actually ingest this alien meat?

"You've seen all this," Harriet parroted.

She abruptly turned away and paced across the hold to the far wall. I sighed and walked after her, but as I drew closer I suddenly realized that there was another square door in this far wall. I paused, scanned about myself, then realized I had never spotted it before because I'd never felt any inclination to walk this far into this dim mausoleum. Harriet nosed a control beside this new door and, rumbling and shaking, it too drew open. I followed her inside.

More dead, I realized, and more ship lice. I gazed at the neat heap—stacked like firewood—for a couple of seconds before reality caught up with me. These weren't prador; they were human corpses. I stood staring for a long drawn-out moment, then forced myself into motion and walked over to inspect them more closely. The corpses here were also vacuum dried and many of them had suffered the depredations of ship lice and in places had been chewed down to the bone. I turned my attention to one nearby that had obviously been dragged from the stack by lice and completely stripped of flesh. The lice had ignored the uniform, obviously getting inside it to dine on the meat. I recognized the uniform at once. I was looking at the skeleton of an ECS commando.

Moving closer, I saw further uniforms, but also a lot of casual dress, a high proportion of clean-room labwear, and the occasional spacesuit and vacuum survival suit. There had to be over a hundred people here.

"You've seen this?" Harriet inquired.

"No," I replied.

"Do you remember?"

I turned toward her. "No, I don't."

I felt slightly sick as I turned away. It must have been a wholly psychological feeling since my artificial body was incapable of nausea. So why had Harriet brought me here to see this? I didn't know, all I did know was that I was standing beside the entire scientific team—plus ECS security personnel—that had been sent to liaise with the Client. I began to head out, then paused now I could see what lay beside the door I'd come in through. I eyed a glittering stack of crystal fragments, ten human corpses untouched by desiccation or decay because, of course, they weren't human but Golem androids. Beside them rested two huge metal beetles, motionless, no light gleaming in their crystal eyes: war drones. It seemed the Client had killed the AI complement of that mission, too.

I headed out of the hold.

The moon was highly volcanic because it was one of many similarly sized moons irregularly orbiting an ice giant. It seemed that they often tore at each other gravitationally, and were torn at by the giant they orbited. In astronomical terms the whole system was unstable and, running a model of it, I saw that at least two of these moons would be shattered in about a hundred thousand years' time; thereafter the system would stabilize with an asteroid ring.

"Do you have something you wish to tell me?" I asked Harriet as I gazed at the images displayed in the hexagonal screens.

"I have nothing I can say to you yet," she replied.

Was that because we were too close to the Client now? I could feel its influence reaching out to me, demanding, dictatorial. Coordinates sat clear in my mind as the
Coin Collector
lurched under fusion drive, dropping lower and decelerating. Even if I wanted to stop this, to go away and never head for those coordinates, I couldn't, for Tank controlled the ship.

The world was mostly black, etched with red veins and red maculae, white at their centers with hot eruptions; smears of grey ash spread equatorially from these. It drew closer and closer, the great ship's engines roaring and the whole vessel shuddering around us.

"Why are we landing?" Harriet asked.

The question was obviously rhetorical.

"Perhaps," she continued, "the bathyspheres are not large enough to convey what needs to be conveyed."

I had never described the Client to her, so was she guessing or did she know? It was true, nevertheless, that if the Client wanted to move itself and its multitude of minions aboard this ship, then the ship had to land. What did this then mean for me?

Soon the horizon was an arc across the whole array of screens before me and we seemed to be coming down on a relatively stable plain before a range of mountains like diseased fangs. Scanning gave me a cave system deep in those mountains, precisely at the location of the coordinates in my mind, while the
Coin Collector
aimed to land to one side of them. I stood up and headed for the door, Harriet as usual close behind me. As I mounted my scooter I sent orders from my artificial body—orders I hoped I could not rescind.

While heading down into the bowels of the ship I turned to Harriet, who was pacing easily at my side. "The air out there isn't breathable."

She flicked her head once. "It doesn't matter—I ceased to need breathable air long ago."

"So you underwent more modifications than I know about?"

"Some," she replied

Lower down, the air in the ship was laced with sulphur and it was hot. It ceased to be breathable for a human being, or any creature that needed oxygen, on the lower level, as we approached a massive open door with a ramp extending from it to the charred ground below. I parked my scooter beside the door, hoping I would be able to return to use it, but doubtful of that, and I began walking down. My artificial lungs had by now ceased to process what they were breathing and my body had gone over to power cells and stored supplies.

"What are they?" Harriet asked.

I peered out across the plain at the four creatures approaching. They looked like manta rays hovering just above the ground as they swept toward us, but upping the magnification of my eyes I could then pick out the blur of insect legs moving underneath them.

"Exo-forms is what we called them," I replied. "The Client is a hive creature and a hive all in one, perpetually conjoined, being born and dying all in one and able to meddle at genetic levels with its parts. It is a natural bio-technician, geneticist, and makes forms like this to interact with environments outside its preferred one. It was a form something like these that acted as a translator."

"So your memories are clearer," Harriet suggested, as we proceeded on down.

I realized they were, and I remembered the terrible anger of the Client when the AIs shut down the project, though the results of that anger were unclear, but for those corpses in the hold, just as were details of the project itself before that, and precisely how it had been closed down. I wondered only then: how could the farcaster have been broken up and taken away if the whole team, including its AIs, had been slaughtered?

The ramp was shaking—perpetual tremors being transmitted from the ground and through it to my feet—but the new rumble was something else. As I stepped off onto a surface of shattered and then heat-fused chunks of obsidian, I turned.

"Here they come," I said, and stepped aside.

The thetics were already a quarter of the way down the ramp, over two hundred of them now. They were all clad in hard shell spacesuits of a combat design that enabled them to move quickly. They came down in good order at a steady trot, in neat rectangular formations. At the base of the ramp they spread out, utterly ignoring me,
following their orders. Two groups of them then went down into firing positions and pulse-rifle fire cut through the poisonous air toward the approaching exo-forms. Two of them immediately went down, plowing into the ground like crashing gravcars. Two more swept to one side, but then a missile from a shoulder launcher hit between them and sent them tumbling. The thetics moved on at a run, heading for the coordinates in my mind.

The Client was very very disappointed in me and I now expected punishing pain which, I felt sure, I could resist for long enough. I followed the thetics out, my mental defenses as tight and as ready as they could be. But there was no attack, and in those parts of my mind where the Client had its grip, all contact slid into something completely alien—beyond my understanding.

"It's a good plan," Harriet opined, "but for the Client's defenses and its absolute hold on you."

"What do you mean?" I asked, now breaking into a fast loping run.

"I mean," said my troodon companion, easily keeping pace with me. "You ordered the thetics to go in after the Client and attack it, and then you disconnected yourself from them so you could issue no further orders, so the Client could not force you to order them to desist."