Darkship Renegades (26 page)

ARACHNOPHOBIA

I ran a long while, into a dark hallway. Somewhere, at the back of the hallway, through a high-placed window a sort of cold green light filtered, probably having come through various branches, or maybe mildew on the window. It threw shadows on that space that gave the impression of the whole area being underground.

At the back of my mind was the idea that I must find a defensible place, or perhaps a place from which I could leave the compound. But the first couple of doors I tried were solidly locked, and it slowly dawned on me I couldn’t leave.

First, I needed to get the information on how to grow powertrees, because if I didn’t we wouldn’t be allowed back into Eden, or, if we were, we couldn’t save them from Castaneda’s clutches, and then Eden would be a tyranny worse than Earth ever was. And second, I was not going anywhere without Kit’s body and the means to bring Kit’s mind back. Because I wasn’t going anywhere without him, but the freedom of Eden depended on us going back.

Yeah, I was fully aware I was up against a superman. That was very sad for the superman, who was against me. I was sure he had absolutely no idea how to surrender gracefully and therefore, he would have to be defeated inch by inch, kicking and screaming the whole way.

I was going to enjoy kicking him and making him scream.

As I realized this, I calmed down enough that I stopped running.

“Thena, come back.” It came from the entrance of the hallway, but Ms. Reasonable was not at home for this. Not now. Not today. Not after Jarl had told me how he intended to rule the world and impregnate me. Or something. My skin crawled so much at the idea that I couldn’t think straight.

So instead of going back, I thought I’d hide from his sight. He couldn’t be without the lenses, because the front room had been fully lit. That meant that if I hid in the shadowy part of the hallway, away from the light coming in through the window, he’d never see me.

I pressed myself against the wall, just as my heartbeat started to slow down and I was thinking over what Jarl had said. His absolute determination that he should serve and rule humanity because he’d been created to do it made me ill, but his clumsy idea of romance with me made me want to cry or laugh. I wasn’t sure which, though I was sure I’d eventually figure it out. His kiss itself hadn’t been clumsy, but what kind of a genius thought that he could seduce a reluctant woman by kissing her against her will?

Caught between repulsion and pity, between tears and laughter, my heart slowed down and seemed less deafening in my ears.

Which allowed to hear the skittering of…something along the wall on which I was leaning. And then I realized I could hear the same skittering along the floor and the other walls.

I jumped away from the wall, pointing my burner at it, and realized the wall seemed to be moving.

Spiders. Thousands and thousands of little spiders covered the wall in every direction. Here and there were bigger spiders, about the size of mice, and then bigger ones, say the size of a housecat. The entire wall was boiling with them, and as I stepped back in the hallway, my feet crunched on something, and I looked down. Forget the wall. The entire floor, the other wall, the ceiling, all were boiling with spiders.

Only the crunch under my foot had not been bone and shell, or any kind of keratin. It had the distinct metallic-ceramite sound of breaking a piece of electronics.

I blinked, realizing that all the spiders were not creatures, but mechanical constructs—little…machines. But it didn’t make it any better that they were all converging on me. All of them. I looked down and saw some climbing my boots.

I had no idea what they’d do, but I knew I didn’t want them to do it on me.

I swept them off my boots by stomping, crunching more of them in the effort, then aimed the burner and burned a broad clear swath of floor. I jumped in the middle of it, and, as the mechanical spider things changed course and started towards me again, I burned behind and around till the wall was clear. Then I burned a swath of the corridor.

But as fast as I burned, more the things came, crawling, creeping towards me. What would they do if they got me? Perhaps they would just walk over me? Or perhaps…

The mind recoiled, and I couldn’t entertain a thought of being covered in these creatures without feeling like I’d never be clean enough again.

I couldn’t breathe and my finger hurt from being jammed so hard on the trigger.

As I was burning the wall clean, once more, I heard steps and turned, burning a wide swath and just missing Jarl, who’d come to stand by my side, burner in hand.

For a moment, in the heat of battle, I wanted to turn and burn Jarl. But not all the battle-madness in the world could make me forget that this was Kit’s body and that if the body were dead Kit could not come back. I burned close to his feet, but not so close I could hurt him.

“You should be glad I didn’t burn you,” I said, as I clobbered at the bugs with my spent burner, while I reached for another one from within my suit.

“Why would you burn me?” he asked in confusion, as he stood with his back against mine. I could hear his burner zapping, presumably clearing a space on the other side of me.

“Never mind,” I said through gritted teeth.

“I’m going to start burning, as we retreat out of the hallway,” Jarl said. “Follow me. They can’t go into the entrance room.”

“No,” I said. “What are these things? your pets?”

There was a long silence, while his burner zapped and the smell of charred electronic components filled the room. Then he said, his voice sounding odd, “I suppose. In a way.”

“What?” I’d come to think that Jarl was a twelve-year-old emotionally, but that was not an answer I expected, nor one that made any sense. “Then why are you burning them?”

“I’ll…explain, but…not now. Right now, we must get out of here. Now, Thena. When I step this way, you step too. We clear the way and we walk to the door.”

He cleared. He stepped. I didn’t. “It’s Athena Hera Sinistra, Patrician Sinistra to you, you utter bastard, and I’m going nowhere till you explain what these are and why they’re attacking me.”

There was another long silence. The flashes from both our burners reflected off the walls and made the hallway look like a little piece of some mythical hell. What worried me more is that though we were burning vast quantities of the bugs, there were always more.

Thena, go. Let him explain this in the front room. Just go.

Whose side are you on?

Kit sounded just slightly exasperated as he answered,
Yours. Ours. Trust me, there is no time to explain what these are. He has some sort of barrier which prevents them from going to the front room. Other things can get past, but not these.

I assessed the situation. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Kit. Of course I trusted Kit. The problem was rather that I trusted Kit himself. But Kit wasn’t in his right mind. In fact, he was barely in his mind at all.

But one thing I was sure of. Whatever remained of Kit in Jarl’s brain would not side with Jarl to lead me into a trap. In fact, they both had seemed to collaborate before to keep me out of trouble.

And while I still didn’t trust Jarl, and I very much would like to know what was going on with these things, I would take Kit’s word for it that he meant what he said, and that I should get out of here. Or at least that was the best of the guesses made by my husband from what he gleaned from Jarl.

“All right,” I said. “Fine. We’ll go towards the door. But then you’re going to explain everything to me.”

“Yes,” he said, in a strangled voice. “Everything.”

We turned as one and cleared a space of ground to the side of us. Then we stepped into it. Then again. Electronic spiders rushed to take in that space, then again, but we managed to move, slowly towards the door.

And then suddenly Jarl screamed, “Stop!” I turned to look the way he was—towards the door.

In front of the door there were yet more spiders, but these were human-sized, and though Jarl immediately aimed at them and burned—as did I, though I wasn’t aware of deciding to do it—all it did was make their carapaces glow. It didn’t make them stop. There were a lot of them, and they were rushing at us.

“Stop firing,” I said, scared half to death but preferring to sound angry. “If you make them all hot, all it will do is make them burn us when they touch us.” And that’s when I realized the things would touch us, and my mouth went very dry and my throat tried to close.

They were large and rounded, covered in some sort of circuits that I guessed ended in sensors, which means they’d have eyes or ears or equivalents. Six of their legs advanced relentlessly, seemingly not caring that they were crunching their smaller congeners under foot. And their two front legs had pincers and other instruments I didn’t understand.

As the front four or so advanced, I realized there were more behind, dozens of them.

“Thena!” Jarl screamed, and his voice seemed to echo both Kit and Jarl’s tones. He burned behind him, towards the wall, and advanced into that spot. I followed him, not because I thought we could escape the electronic things advancing on us, but because I wanted to keep my back pressed against him, to feel human warmth a little longer.

I’m not afraid of insects. Or rather, I’m not afraid of non-poisonous insects. I lived long enough in broomers lairs, where no one is responsible for cleaning, that ants and fliers and spiders don’t bother me as much as they would your average patrician. I kill poisonous insects, but that’s something else.

But these weren’t insects. They might have some biological component—I didn’t know, most of Eden’s machines did, and these had been designed by Jarl who had been the seminal force in Eden science—but I didn’t care about that. They were still machines.

Seeing them advance, I understood the unreasoning fear that many humans have for machines. Not that I’d ever had it. I’m a Nav by trade, which means I have an innate ability with machines. I understand them, and most of them are a lot less troublesome than human beings. Machines have made human life better. Kit says that machines are what allowed humanity to dispense with the age-old evil that was slavery. I believe him. He read a lot more history than I ever did.

So I never feared machines. But these machines were different. What had they been built for, and what did they want with us? What did they think they could achieve? Could they think? What were they designed to do?

In the face of creatures like that, human warmth was a comforting thing, even if the warmth came from my husband’s body, which had been taken over by a crazed old genius.

I burned the ground in front of them, even as Jarl burned to the other side—kind enough to clear a space for my feet also—and we retreated into it. Again and again, he burned and we stepped that way. Again and again towards the wall, as the things advanced. I made the ceramite floor glow in front of them, causing the smaller creatures to flame out and become so many piles of charred components.

The giant mechanical spiders didn’t care. They kept on coming.

And coming.

As they surrounded us on all sides, save for our backs which were tight against the wall, I felt the smaller spiders climb from the wall into my skull. “What the hell are these things, Jarl? What do they want?”

“They’re peripherals,” he said. “They were supposed to defend the central computer in this place.”

“What? Why?”

I swear he said “Because it was me,” before the world went black.

SPARE PARTS

I woke up in the dark, and I was cold and naked.

My bare bottom was pressed against a flat, dusty surface; my arm had been bent at an odd angle under me, my face was pressed against a hard, cold, vertical surface. And I felt fuzzy-headed and somewhat less than awake. My head hurt. So did my body, at various points, as though I’d been dragged, naked, along a floor. And as though pincerlike claws had tightened hard somewhere near my wrists.

They’d given me some drug.

From somewhere in the direction of my feet came a groan that sounded like the type of sound men make when they’ve drunk too much and are about to throw up.

Thena?
Kit’s voice, like a distant murmur.

Here,
I said.
Where are we? What have they done to us?

I don’t know,
Kit said
.
Something like an implied chuckle.
When he’s unconscious, I can’t see or hear.

What did he mean by saying “it was me”?
I asked.

Kit said,
He thinks of the computer as himself, which…is weird. I can’t explain it, you’ll have to ask him.

The groan came again, low and forlorn, and I thought: Right.

I did not like this situation. I was alone with a man who didn’t seem to understand that I didn’t view him as my husband, and whose concept of “no” was fuzzy. I was naked. I was fairly sure they’d given me some drug or done something to me that made me still not fully awake or capable of reasoning. And though I had not the slightest idea where I might be, I was fairly sure that I was somewhere within reach and patrol of truly strange electronic “insects.” And those were under control of a computer that Jarl said was him…Right.

I didn’t have to like the situation. Sometimes, reality must be accepted for what it is. There is no point wiggling and trying to pretend it is something it isn’t. People and civilizations who do that usually go under and die while still gallantly clinging to their beautiful illusions.

In the end there are only two types of people: those who survive and those who don’t. And I intended to survive.

I forced myself to sit up against the protest of my abraded skin and bruised limbs. A quick inventory showed me that I had no broken bones and the arm hurt only because I’d been thrown into a heap, while unconscious, by things that didn’t understand the human body at all. It screamed in pin-prick pains as circulation returned, but it would be fine eventually.

I massaged it slowly, while taking another type of inventory. As far as I could feel, I was disarmed. My burners had been taken from me, even those that were in places where I normally kept them while naked.

This alarmed me more than anything else, because as far my body mass goes I’m a thoroughly non impressive human being. Oh, because of the way I was designed, I’m somewhat stronger than most humans the same size. But in the end without a burner, anyone could take me and hold me hostage—if they had a burner and me without one.

It was like thinking of disarmament efforts of the twenty-first century and before, where people actually believed that groups or individuals would give up on armament that was technologically possible in the name of high mindedness or something. Never happens.

When there’s the possibility that a hostile—or whatever you consider a hostile—will get hold of a weapon to use against you, your best bet is to have that weapon or a bigger one in reserve. Counting on other people to be nice to you because you’re disarmed and patently peaceful is one of those mistakes that individuals and civilizations only make once. It is a characteristic of the dead that they can no longer make mistakes.

So I liked being disarmed as much as I liked being naked. Which of course, were two problems of the same sort. I lacked protection. Fortunately, I still had me.

I blinked, as my eyes became used to the surroundings. There was a little light starting to filter in, and I identified its source—a window high up to my left—covered in something translucent and green. I’d guess glass obscured by either foliage or a film of green scum.

The light was visibly increasing by the moment, which probably meant that it was morning and the sun was coming up. Which meant more than twelve hours had passed since the fight. Yes, they had to have drugged us. There was no possible way hitting me on the head would make me sleep that long, or wake up this confused.

As more light filtered in, I could see the surroundings, not clearly, but well enough to tell where I was. It was a room, and the door was locked. The windows would be, I guessed, dimatough. And though this might, at one time, have been a resort, before Jarl bought it, and while I assumed the rooms had been minimally taken care of, we were not in something as sophisticated as a bedroom. No. This had all the hallmarks of a high-tech broom closet. It was us and some machinery that looked like robot cleaners—turtlelike vacuums and columnar waiter-robots—thrown together in various states of disarray. The machines were sideways and upside down, as though they’d been flung down, without the least care for their functionality.

Horror made my skin crawl as I realized that it was far, far worse than us being thrown into a broom closet. We were thrown in a broken-broom closet, one in which machinery and things were kept that were no longer used or needed.

I swallowed and looked at the softer heap that I knew was Jarl. Jarl was thrown against another wall, opposite me, also naked, and from the way he’d been flung, I’d have thought he was dead, except for Kit’s mental voice reaching me, and for Jarl’s occasional groans.

So, he was alive and not well.

I looked around the room again. Broken machinery that was no longer needed. Humans who had been stashed in here because they weren’t needed, or had to be kept out of the way.

The fact that we’d been thrown in with machines made me wonder whether the computer controlling the things that had captured us even understood that we were different—that we would need water and food, for instance. Or perhaps the electronic brain behind our troubles thought of us as spare machinery, which could be thrown aside and forgotten until it was needed to be repaired and used.

I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath of the air that felt musty and dusty. It didn’t matter, did it? Whatever the computer thought, whatever the computer was, it was, clearly, the key to our getting out of captivity. We were being held prisoner by a machine whose peripherals we couldn’t defeat, and which had locked us in a room, away from whatever its plans and interests were. That meant that where we needed to be was out of here. What we needed to do was turn off that computer.

Easier said than done, I know, but if you’re going to allow yourself to be defeated by overwhelming odds, you’ll…probably not survive, or not in any way you want.

First, to find out what the computer was. If I was very lucky, that would tell me what the computer had been programmed to do and how to defeat it.

Given that I’d have to beat the truth out of Jarl—possibly literally—and that my being naked already put me at a disadvantage with him, I needed a weapon.

I found it in the torn-off arm of one of the servo robots. Its severed-from-the-body end made a passable club; the other end made a passable stabbing tool.

I grabbed it and turned with it in my hand, ready to hit Jarl over the head and make him confess what kind of monster he’d created when he’d programmed this computer.

And felt immediately guilty. Jarl was pulling himself up to sitting, in the sort of movement people make when everything hurts.

He dragged his back up against the wall, and looked in my direction, as his eyes appeared to be trying to focus. Then his eyes widened.
Thena!
Kit’s mental voice said. Jarl just looked shocked.

I repressed an impulse to reassure Kit or comfort Jarl
. No.
If you’re too kind in this sort of situation, it just means you have to be harsher later.

“Talk,” I told Jarl. “Start by telling me what you mean by the computer
being
you.”