Predator - Incursion (18 page)

Against all odds, and despite my stark misgivings, it actually worked—for a time. For long enough to find the place we called “Midsummer.” At first we thought it was a small moon, but then it became clear that it was artificial. An alien space habitat, perhaps five million years old. Long dead, or so we thought, but deep beneath the surface, in places I wish we had not ventured, we found something else.

They were asleep, and should have been left that way.

But Wordsworth woke them up.

Beyond the Human Sphere
July 2692
AD

Macbeth
was a much different ship from the one that fled the Human Sphere two hundred years before. Faster, larger, changed beyond recognition, it would have taken Liliya a standard day to walk from bow to stern—and she knew every inch of it, including where to hide.

She had broken away from the guards as they were taking her toward a secure cell. Shipborn, they still held her in awe, an old woman who did not show her years, an artificial person who could not be told apart from any other human. With all the things they had discovered on Midsummer, Liliya thought she would have been regarded as relatively normal. Yet still she was considered extraordinary, and such a wonder closer to home was more powerful than one found in the depths of space.

The man and woman were so afraid of her that they almost didn’t fight when she broke her bindings. Almost. She put them down as gently as she could, and then she fled. Down through the bowels of the
Macbeth
’s accommodation levels, past the dining and recreation rooms, she made her way through the transformed vessel like a virus through a giant’s veins.

On Midsummer they had discovered incredible technologies, many of them so advanced that machine and biology were difficult to tell apart. After a long time spent studying and analyzing, it had become clear that the habitat itself was still growing, new areas extruded from huge slug-like creatures they had found deep beneath the giant, spherical habitat’s outer crust.

One of those creatures had been brought on board
Macbeth
, and it wandered the ship at will, unhindered and unfettered. Unknowable, untouchable by any means of communication they had tried, it had quickly begun to expand and improve upon the ship’s structure and design. It built not only structural and solid portions of the ship, but controls, electronics, and other more arcane tech whose uses were even now still being learned. Over a century it had remade the ship from the inside out, extruding material from its various appendages and forming, molding, refining, and hardening it in place.

They still did not know whether it was truly a creature or a machine. It resembled a large slug but had mechanical parts. It fed and excreted, but also had a constantly recharging power source. Whatever it was, wherever it came from, its reason for being was to build.

The modern
Macbeth
looked more like it had been grown, instead of built, and it was faster and more efficient than ever. Liliya moved through these strange spaces now—once corridors and vestibules and doorways, now tunnels and valves, hollows and atriums. Taking the creature on board had been a risk with which she had not agreed, but by then Wordsworth was dead and Beatrix Maloney was in charge.

The whole dynamic of the Founders had changed.

No longer Founders… they had become the Rage.

Her suspicions had been building for some time. Maloney’s insistence that they return to the Human Sphere, her renaming of their dwindling, troubled civilization, and now the messages they had been sending with covert meanings, all pointed toward something Liliya hated even considering. Maloney had virtually admitted herself that this could not be a peaceful return.

Like a web cast through the interior of the
Macbeth
, feeding along its tunnels and hidden places, Liliya’s reach had spread and expanded more than anyone knew. She had kept quiet the scope of her influence and knowledge. Being friendly with one person did not mean she had to tell another. Having a hand in one man’s research did not preclude her from stealing from a woman’s gathering knowledge. In the center of the web Liliya, the spider, watched and waited, spied and shivered as the picture grew of what was happening, where, and why.

She knew that the violence had already commenced. Still beyond the Human Sphere, attacks had been launched on another species. Trials, Maloney and her Inner Sanctum had called them. Mock assaults, testing the weapons at their disposal before the real attack began and the true purpose of the Rage would be revealed.

The insidious message Maloney had asked her to send had been the last straw. Liliya should have rebelled years ago, fought against everything she saw happening and knew might happen in the coming months and years, but loyalty ran deep, and her commitment to the Founders and the philosophy upon which they were based was implanted way down in her artificial memory.

She had long ago moved beyond the simple matter of programming. Her years in the escape pod had both damaged her and made her more… human. She had become her own agent, as much an individual as any other person, with goals and aims, likes and dislikes, but a steadily building sense of dread about the Rage and what they planned had shadowed her existence for years.

It was time to slip out from beneath those shadows.

The irony of what she planned was not lost on her. Almost three hundred years ago, she had stolen the prized research from a special ship, doomed it and its occupants, and launched herself into space. The difference this time was that she fully intended to be the captain of her own destiny. She would steal as before, and leave the ship from which she stole. But she had a destination in mind.

The Rage was going home.

Liliya had to reach there faster.

Maloney and her Founders would know of her escape soon enough. Floating in their support structures, enveloped in the rejuvenating gel, their old minds would come together in agreement—Liliya would have to be stopped.

She’s known me for forever
, Liliya thought, remembering again and again how she had shoved Beatrix Maloney across the room and into the wall. Such aggression was unheard of, committed against a friend and ally, and it had set her synapses sparking in confusion, but she wasn’t sure Maloney
was
still a friend. Perhaps she never had been.

Heading toward the rear of the ship, she passed one of the original Founders, Erika Simons, submerged in her gel tank aboard the robotic walking support structure she favored. Her eyes looked swollen through the magnifying gel, all body movement slow as the contraption took her wherever she commanded. She looked at Liliya, corners of her mouth turning up in something resembling a smile. Her skin was a pasty white, hair a startled sculpture in the thick fluid, her wasted, naked body shriveled and sickly. The gel kept her alive and functioning, and Liliya knew not to let appearances deceive. Simons might be more than three hundred years old, but her mind was as sharp as a knife.

Liliya smiled as they passed by in the narrow tunnel, watching for any sign that Erika knew of her escape. There were no indications, at least outwardly. The woman’s walker carried her away, insect-like and almost totally silent.

Liliya hurried on.

She passed a couple of shipborn going about their duties, and soon she was in a tunnel that curved around the swollen belly of the ship’s hold. She knew what was contained in there—it was no secret, because the Rage all bore the same intention. Every child, man, and woman, whether they were ten years old or three hundred. Pregnant with violence and death, the hold was a place that Liliya had no wish to visit, ever again.

Maybe I can stop it all now
, she thought. The idea struck her, feeling as hard as a punch, and she paused, blinking in the weak light and trying to imagine what that might entail. Destruction on a grand scale. Murder, when every instinct within her—every thought, movement, or inclination derived from her original programming, expanded and mused upon over the decades and centuries since—told her that murder was a bad thing.

I could sabotage the support network in there. I could blast open the hull, vent everything to hyperspace. One simple act, and the whole ship would be torn apart, become a smear across time and space, and then nothing. No sign that we had ever existed. Nothing left of me.

She wasn’t sure what made her forge ahead with her original plan. She tried to tell herself that it was her base synthetic programming and the tenets laid down in her original, ancient synapse circuits, but she also thought it might be because she was more human than many of the people on the
Macbeth
, and in that humanity she had discovered fear.

Fear of death, and the nothing that would follow.

She passed the hold. It was vast and it took some time, but behind it she knew there was a place she had to visit before attempting to flee. As soon as her escape was announced around the ship, nowhere would be safe.

The laboratory was one of several on the
Macbeth
, but this one was closest to the hold and the things it contained. It was a large, low-ceilinged room, the floor level but walls and ceiling textured and lined like the insides of a living thing. Another place created almost completely by the creature they had found on Midsummer.

She paused and looked around. So much of what had been achieved in here had been seeded by what she had stolen from the
Evelyn-Tew
, research that had been the catalyst for the monstrosities the
Macbeth
now bore back toward the Human Sphere. Discoveries on that alien habitat, Midsummer, had contributed, true, but the information she had carried had started it all. It had given the Founders—and later, Beatrix Maloney and the Rage—the abilities that made them what they were today.

Unbeatable, perhaps.

Monstrous, for sure.

As Liliya crossed the lab toward the cool storage hollows in the wall, a voice halted her in her tracks.

“Come to steal, Liliya?” It was Erika Simons. She must have learned of Liliya’s transgression and returned quickly to the lab. Her construct skittered from the shadows at the rear of the room, carrying the shriveled woman in her tank of gel. Her words were flat and monotone, an electrical facsimile of what her true voice had once been, driven purely by thought patterns. Grotesquely, her mouth still moved when she spoke, the mysterious clear substance distorting and bubbling.

“Not to steal,” Liliya said.

“Then what?” Two more shapes moved behind Erika. One was a shipborn, weak and strange-looking from the decades of in-breeding. Not even the technology they had found on Midsummer could expand their limited gene pool.

The other figure was one of the generals. The generals were combat androids, designed and built specifically by the Rage elders to control their monstrous troops, and programmed with every scrap of military history, tactics, and strategy the Rage could acquire. From early human history, through the technological revolution and three World Wars, and into the territorial conflicts that had marked the first centuries of space exploration and colonization, the droids knew it all.

This one liked to call himself Napoleon.

In some ways they were more advanced than Liliya. They carried nano-technology originally discovered on Midsummer and modified to link them symbiotically to their armies. They could control two thousand troops with a thought. Yet in other ways, they were so much less than her.

Built for war, their aesthetics had become an afterthought. They were humanoid but not human, with blank faces and haunting, empty expressions. Their eyes were white with black pupils. The blood in their veins was the clear gel, a lubricant rather than a life-giver. Liliya found them unsettling, and had never felt of the same ilk.

Napoleon stared at her, one hand resting on his sidearm. That was another technology they had taken from Midsummer—his weapon could punch a hole through the
Macbeth
, if he signaled it to do so.

“What are you doing here?” Erika asked again, but her questioning was a stalling tactic, and she didn’t wait for an answer.

The shipborn came first, darting around the aged woman and drawing a stun baton from her belt. She looked afraid but determined, keen to prove herself to the elder.

Liliya had to think and act quickly. If the baton struck her she would be paralyzed for an instant, long enough for Napoleon to grasp and crush her into submission. But this situation was completely alien to her. Violence had not been a part of her life—not even with everything the Founders and then the Rage had been through. Losing their sister ships, exploring new worlds, combating system failures and potential disasters, discovering Midsummer, and eventually being forced to leave that artificial world because it could never be a home to them.

Liliya was not built to fight.

The woman swung the baton, feinted, and then kicked out, intending to trip her and land the baton on her neck.

Liliya grasped the shipborn’s foot in both hands and twisted. The woman grunted, half-turned in the air, and hit the deck face first. The baton bounced from her hand, and Liliya caught it in mid-air. Pausing only for a second, she brought it down hard on the woman’s lower back.