Lesser Gods (5 page)

“What can I take you for?” the store owner asked, smile now permanently frozen in place.

“Cartridges. Two millimeter SRR, armor piercing.”

The man behind the counter scratched his chin, raised an eyebrow, and then vanished behind the counter. He reappeared a second later with a box of pre-loaded, disposable magazines in his hand. “Anything else?”

“No — but I’m in a hurry.”

He plinked the ammo on the counter and shoved the packet through the transfer slot that cycled and brought the ammunition to my side of the armored window. I pulled my charge card out of his machine and pocketed it, then snatched the ammo packet, broke it open, and jammed a magazine into my pistol.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d settle your differences outside my store,” the owner said.

I nodded as he vanished behind blast shields that were lowering themselves over the windows. I turned back toward the entrance as my gun cycled itself automatically. The view screen on the rear of the pistol showed it was fat with forty-eight rounds of destruction, a green diode announcing its readiness to kill.

Before I could exit, the rusty machine gun headed Harvie appeared, his gears grinding as he struggled to bring the long barrel of his weapon onto target.

Reflexively I centered the aiming dot of my weapon on his neck and squeezed off a burst. Three hyper-velocity needles connected an instant before he could fire, stitching his neck with a bloody triangle of holes. He tumbled backward onto the sidewalk, a cacophony of lifeless metal.

Harvies are nothing if not persistent, so I braced myself for the coming onslaught. It would only be a matter of time before others came, rolling over their comrade to take their turn at trying to ace me. And I was cornered in the store, any avenue of escape now blocked by impenetrable blast shields.

A grating of gears and clanking of spare parts echoed down the street. But, as I listened, I realized the noise was moving away from me. I chanced a peek outside; the creatures had left.

A trap?

I couldn’t imagine what would have inspired them to leave, but wasn’t going to wait around while they regrouped for another assault.

I took a deep breath, muttered a prayer of thanksgiving, and “thought” my imbedded cellular on so I could call a taxi.

No dial tone.

Then I remembered Death’s henchmen had stolen my subphone. I turned toward the shop owner who was reappearing as the shop’s blast shields retracted.

“Nice shot. Watched it all on the closed circuit.”

“Can you call a cab for me?”

“Good idea,” he replied. “Anybody that aces the leader of the Demons TTS should be getting out of Dodge as quick as possible.”

It took a moment for what he’d said to sink in. “Aced their leader?” I asked. “You don’t mean that —”

“That one lying there in the street with the three holes in his neck was the leader of the pack.”

“Then why’d they leave?”

“Regrouped to choose a new leader. After that, their first order of business will be to get your scalp.”

I gulped.

“I’d give you about a half hour, tops,” he continued, “I’ll be more than happy to call you a cab and get you out of here. ‘Cause I most certainly don’t want you around my shop when word gets around about what you did. Buddy, you’re in deep —”

“I get the picture,” I interrupted. “Make the call, would you?”

Louis Berlioz

We’d settled into our work couches, Jet running in our veins. My mind drifted in nothingness, then there was a shuddering shift and I was in my robotic self, orbiting the vast asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

I looked down at the finely jointed mechanical hands that now were mine as I unlatched what we jokingly called our crypts — the official name being the “Mark 4 Unit Maintenance and Containment System” — the usual mouthful only a corporate bureaucracy can create.

It took me a minute to adjust to the change — the old timers didn’t seem phased by the transfer. Most of the crypts were already empty and I would be the last one to the job once again.

Finally I rose and pushed off with my feet from the crypt, grabbing a handhold on the wall as I cleared the storage bin, then kicked the lid of my crypt shut like the old-timers did, though lacking their practiced grace, let Newtonian physics propel the lid shut while propelling me in that equal and opposite direction. After traveling through the air for ten meters, I latched on to the slowly rotating ladder leading from the the inner ring of the crew quarters, where the real flesh-and-blood crew lived on the outer edge of the spinning assembly, enjoying the centrifugal artificial gravity needed to maintain their health.

I aligned myself with the central shaft and floated along the long ladder leading toward the inner hub of the ship, shedding the last vestiges of gravity with each rung I passed until I was all but weightless, only the micro-G forces of the mass around me having any say in the matter, and for all practical purposes non-existent.

Once at the hub I — my mechanical self — kicked into another short flight, traveling through the narrow passageway 30 meters before grabbing a handhold to pull myself toward my work station.

“Glad you could grace us with your presence,” the foreman groused as I neared the nose of the spinning spacecraft. Like the rest of us, he had a human face but lacked an articulated mouth, his words instead being transferred directly into my skull.

“Hey, I have fifteen seconds to spare,” I quipped, knowing it would irritate him. There was something about the foreman that got under my skin and I took every chance I got to irk him, even though doing so wasn’t too bright.

The foreman snorted as I slammed the safety hatch shut behind me and pulled my weightless body onto the worn work couch in the center of the cramped quarters. The warning gong clanged just as I finished strapping myself in.

I stared into the blackness beyond the porthole. Only four inches of transparent quartz stood between me and a sudden, airless death.
Well, not really,
I reminded myself. Since my mechanical body didn’t need air, the protection of the glass was mostly illusionary. In fact Sam had heard we worked in an airless environment. I don’t know if that was true or not, but it made sense in terms of less corrosion and wear and tear on our mechanical bodies. On the other hand, with the out-gassing problems plastics have in a vacuum…. Well, bottom line was none of us knew if we were working in air or not, and it didn’t really make any difference to us because our unconscious bodies were alive and breathing air millions of miles away.

But the cold glare of the distant stars seemed real enough, and reminded me that if something went wrong, it was nice to know that the real me was safe back on Earth out of harm’s way, even though it felt like I was out here in space right at the moment.

“One minute,” the foreman’s voice warned. If I’d had lungs, I would have taken a deep breath, ready for the release of our probes. I adjusted the light in my cubical so it was dark, giving a clear view of stars beyond the portal in front of me. Then I flicked at the dust mote that floated between me and the glass.

“Ten seconds until launch,” the foreman warned. He counted off the seconds and they yelled, “Launch!”

The spaceship’s deck rattled almost imperceptibly as our mining probes left their tubes. I eased my joystick forward and watched my probe race from the ship, propelled by its impulse rockets. Unlike the other probes that moved smoothly, mine jerked along, betraying my lack of experience. Once my probe had cleared the others flanking it, I shifted my view from the port to the TV camera on the probe’s nose.

My probe on course, I slipped my control from my android remote hand to that of the claw on the probe, again having a momentary feeling of being in two places at once before my hand became that of the probe’s. I flexed my new fingers, rotating the claw to be sure it was functioning properly, then I double checked my speed and studied the radar display superimposed in my view.

My speed was a little low, so I kicked a rocket control for a brief correction and repositioned, putting it on a course that would overtake a blip that hadn’t yet been designated by one of my fellow miners. Once my target was marked in the main computer, I picked secondary targets that I could quickly scoop up once I captured the main target.

“Swarm’s coming up,” the foreman warned needlessly as our probes overtook the tiny asteroids and bits of frozen ice.

I kicked my probe’s thruster to head in closer to my designated chunk of ice and rock. Then I eased on the braking rocket to match the asteroid’s speed.
Gently, gently,
I warned myself as I extended my/probe’s clawed hand. I didn’t want to be docked for the cost of another bent claw. I was paid well, but not that well.

I eased the claw forward and after a few false starts, I grasped the lump of gold and ice. Then I hit the “auto load” button in front of my android self and the claw smoothly inserted the stone into the probe’s interior storage compartment without my help. I focused my attention on my secondary targets, and jetted toward the nearest one.

Abruptly my eyes glowed brightly and then went pitch black. “Hey!” I yelled. “I’ve lost my —”

I didn’t say more, because the cursing and shouting over the intercom let me know that the others were experiencing the same problem. Swearing under my breath, I pulled out of the probe into my android self, and saw that the probe’s view screen was dead.

I glanced out the port, but the intense light was almost blinding. For a moment I tried to regain control of my probe. But I could tell from the limpness in my probe claw that the connection had been lost. My hand felt as if it was rolling out of control. I was unsure what to do and finally switched back out of the probe once more so my claw again became my hand. Or, more correctly, the hand of my mechanical body far out in space — though it seemed I was there rather than back on Earth.

“Abandon your probes,” the foreman ordered. “Everyone stay in your cubicles. The captain’s trying to take us out of this. We’re keeping you in your remote bodies for the time being so you can stow yourselves in your crypts if we get free.”

All I heard was “out of this” and “if we get free.”
Out of what?
I wondered.

The light was bright enough that we might have been inside Venus’s orbit looking toward the Sun instead of almost to Jupiter.

I craned my head around, squinting as I tried to discover the light source. Finally I quit, the glare from the metal trim on my port making the light unbearably bright.

The engines of our ship rumbled ominously and I felt a chill, even though it was impossible for the body I occupied to feel any such thing. The hyperdrives continued powering, whipped to a feverish pitch unlike any I’d heard during my last four missions on the ship
.

How much more could the engines take without melting down?
I wondered. I didn’t know the first thing about the engines that powered the ship, but the noise coming through the bulkhead didn’t sound safe to my untrained ear.

“What the hell’s going on?” Sam yelled over the intercom.

“Evasive maneuvers,” the foreman replied. “Everyone sit tight and shut up. We need to keep the comm channel clear. Just in case.”

I tightened the straps holding me in place, uncomfortably aware that we sat in the nose of the craft with only a few inches of glass between us and nothingness. Miles — light days — of nothingness, I thought, gazing toward the brightly shining porthole. Even though my eyes had had time to adjust, the light was still so intense that it was painful to look at it.

“Thirty seconds to impact,” the foreman warned.

Impact?
I thought.

“All emergency hatches are to remain sealed,” the captain’s voice announced.

The intercom erupted in chaos as miners demanded to know what was headed toward them while others swore. I wondered what would happen if our mechanical bodies were destroyed while we were still connected to them via our quantum entanglement machine.

We’d been told it was perfectly safe.

But I’d never trusted a corporation to tell the truth, and I had a feeling we weren’t nearly as safe as we had been told.