Forsaken Skies (65 page)

Then his back struck something very hard and unyielding and he started bouncing away, all the air in his lungs exploding out of his mouth and misting the inside of his helmet. He twisted himself around and reached out with one hand, desperately trying to get hold of whatever was behind him, whatever it was he'd hit.

It was another of the long spiral catwalks, a helix pointing at the red smear at the center of the queenship. He held on even as momentum tried to yank him free. Bounced around like a ball on a string until he could get one leg around a girder, bracing himself.

Back near the maw more of the workers launched themselves toward him, dandelion seeds of wicked limbs drifting through the open space. He lifted his pistol but it was useless—there was no way he could shoot all of them, and even if he did he doubted he'd be lucky enough to push them away like he had the first one.

No, they would catch him eventually. Especially since his lamps showed him movement all around him now, plenty more workers on various catwalks speeding toward him.

He had to keep moving. Had to reach the core before they could kill him.

He slapped his pistol back on his hip and grabbed the catwalk with both hands. Pulled himself along, inward, toward the core. The bombs bounced against his chest like medals on an admiral. At least he still had those.

He moved as fast as he could, pushing himself from one handhold to the next, kicking with his legs and flying free when he was sure he would find something to catch. He followed the curve of the catwalk, twisting along with it. In zero gravity there was no up and down and he knew he was in real danger of getting disoriented, of ending up crawling in the wrong direction.

He reached out and grabbed a support stanchion, yanked himself around and over a girder to try to get a better look at his destination, to see if he was at least making progress. Reached for another stanchion—and stopped dead still.

A worker perched on the catwalk, almost right on top of him. One of its multi-fingered hands reached for his face.

Lanoe grabbed for his pistol, knowing there was no time to bring it up, knowing he would never get a shot off. That hand would close around his helmet at any moment, close and crush it until it shattered—

Except when he looked back up at the thing, its arm was still centimeters away from him. It moved with a sudden jerk, a millimeter closer, then stopped.

One of its legs was descending toward the girder, maybe looking to improve its grip there. He watched it move with glacial slowness, in little fits and starts.

“Lanoe?” someone called.

He was too shocked to answer, at first.

“Lanoe?”

“Valk?” he called back. “Valk? You're still alive?”

“Heh. I wouldn't say that. Exactly.”

The lander put another leg down inside the crater.

Drew it back.

“They're having trouble—they can't get good footing,” Ehta said. Maybe just to herself. She didn't know if Roan could hear her. She didn't know if the girl was still alive. “Hell's bells. I kind of wish they would just jump down here. Make it quick.” She was close to sobbing. She'd really thought they had a chance. She'd thought she could make up for her inability to fly, somehow. She'd thought—

“No,” Roan said.

Her voice was very faint. Ehta could hear her just fine.

“We have to stay alive,” the girl told her. “The landers…”

Ehta rushed over to kneel next to the girl. Roan's face had turned white as a sheet, the blood having drained even from her lips. Her eyes looked like they were drying out. “The landers sense life. If we die…”

“They'll move on,” Ehta finished. “They'll head for the next living thing they can find.” Which meant the volunteers over at the gun camp. “But Roan—they'll figure it out in a minute. They'll find some way down here, and then—”

Well, she didn't have to make it easy on them.

She hurried around to the back of the broken rover. The cannon's barrel was dug into the soft ground but it didn't look bent. It was still hooked up to the three intact batteries.

It was too big, too heavy for Ehta to lift, even on Aruna. She could never just pick it up and use it like a rifle—the thing was a vehicular weapon, meant to be mounted to the side of a spacecraft. Still. Maybe. Maybe just.

She hauled down on its stock, worried the pistol grip might break off at its jury-rigged weld point. The barrel resisted her, buried as it was in the dirt. It came loose with a jerk that sent her sprawling.

Up on the lip of the crater, one of the landers had three feet down inside the steep wall. Two of its claws pushed hard into the rock there, anchoring themselves. It was making progress.

Ehta grabbed the end of the cannon and twisted it around. It clanked against the roll bar—it couldn't quite traverse far enough for her to get a shot at the adventurous lander. She cried out in dismay. Then she did what she had to do. She found the cotter pin that held the cannon in its mounting and yanked it free.

The cannon came down on top of her, heavy enough to make her gasp. She wrestled it around until the barrel pointed almost straight up. Pulled the trigger and prayed the cannon hadn't been damaged in the crash, that it wasn't about to explode in a million pieces.

She had no control, no real ability to aim with any kind of accuracy. She kept the trigger held down, spraying particle beams across the whole lip of the crater. A lander's leg and then two more came loose, severed by her wild fire. They tumbled down the slope toward her, still twitching.

“Is Thom okay?” Roan asked.

“He's doing great!” Ehta screamed, as she kept blazing away at the shadows up above her.

Lanoe pulled himself along the catwalk, hand over hand. Behind him the workers followed, plodding along so slowly they were no threat.

“How did you—I mean, how are you—”

“I was a false-mind,” Valk told him. “An artificial intelligence tricked into thinking it was something else. The queenship made me true.”

Lanoe didn't even try to understand what any of that meant.

“You knew what I was. Didn't you? When I lowered my helmet for you, back on Niraya. You saw what I was.”

Lanoe shook his head. “I didn't know what I saw. I guess maybe—it was one thing I thought, that maybe you were…a…”

“AI,” Valk said.

Totally illegal. Thoroughly unethical. Somebody had recorded Valk's brain, all his memories, his personality, his innermost thoughts and secret desires. His sense of humor. His goofy mannerisms. Put them in a computer, then told him he had lived, that he hadn't burned to death in his fighter's cockpit after all.

“I could have died, Lanoe,” Valk said.

“I thought you—”

“I mean, I could have died for real. Anytime I wanted to, anytime since they put me in this suit. I had an off switch. They hid it from me, but not very hard. If I'd gone looking for it I could have saved myself so much pain. I could have just stopped. It wouldn't even have felt like dying. It wouldn't have hurt.”

Lanoe grimaced as he pulled himself along the catwalk. His arms burned with the effort and he didn't see that he'd made much progress.

“It's really tempting,” Valk said. “I could do it right now.”

“I'm guessing you're the one keeping me alive right now,” Lanoe said, looking back over his shoulder. The workers were still coming after him. Very, very slowly. “You're slowing them down somehow.”

“P does not equal NP. It's a kind of denial-of-service attack,” Valk said.

“Buddy, you made a lot more sense when you thought you were human.”

Valk laughed. It sounded exactly like his old, human laugh.

“The aliens who built this thing—actually, not this one, this ship was built by another ship, which was built by another ship—”

“Details later, maybe,” Lanoe suggested.

“The aliens built this thing to terraform worlds for them.
Terraform
is the wrong word, maybe a better term would be…sorry. Never mind. They built this thing as a construction vehicle. They knew it might run into other life-forms out there in space. People like them. They put a big subroutine in its programming telling it that it had to try to talk to any intelligent life it found. Any minds.”

“There were minds on Niraya when it arrived,” Lanoe pointed out.

“That's the problem, of course. The aliens, when they wrote the program, they expected other self-aware creatures to be like them. To look like them. You don't look like them, you don't even run on the same kind of chemistry. It thinks you're just vermin. A bug to be exterminated. Me, though—it recognized me. Because I look like it does. A computer.”

“That's why you could understand the message it sent, the request to talk, when nobody else could,” Lanoe posited.

“Yep. It thinks I'm its peer. So it has to talk to me. Its programming requires it to answer any question I ask.”

“So you…you asked it if you could be in charge, right? If you could give it new instructions?”

“I tried that. Sorry, Lanoe, it didn't work. I can't tell it what to do. All I can do is ask questions. But I can ask a lot of them. Now that I know what I am, I'm not limited to asking questions verbally. I can ask them as fast as I can transfer data, and that's very, very fast. I'm currently asking it about eight billion questions per second.”

“Hellfire.”

“Mostly the same ones over and over. It doesn't take long for the queenship to answer them. But because P does not equal NP—sorry, I'm doing it again. Because of the way the queenship thinks, it takes processor power to answer all those questions. I'm keeping it busy, and that slows down its ability to build new drones. Or send workers to pull your legs off.”

“I…appreciate it,” Lanoe told him.

“Anything for the squadron, right? And then, when you're done, doing whatever you plan on doing here—”

“I've got some—”

“Don't tell me!” Valk insisted. “It can ask questions of me, too.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“When you're done, then I can press the big black button. That's all right, isn't it? You'll let me? You'll give me permission to die?”

“Bastards!” Ehta shrieked, blazing away at the landers above her.

She did not look at how much power remained in her batteries. She did not want to know.

Her arm had grown numb. That might just be her suit compensating for her injury. She didn't care.

Roan hadn't spoken in a while.

Let her rest,
Ehta thought.

“You want me? Come and get me!” she shouted.

Marines knew when not to ask too many questions.