Nemesis (60 page)

‘Inside,’ said Hoxer.

Ann didn’t need telling twice. As soon as the team was aboard, the doors sealed and the lifter pulled up into the air. Hoxer twiddled his comms while his men locked Ann’s arms to a handle on the wall.

‘Senator Voss,’ he said. ‘You asked for a direct report. We have the traitor Ann Ludik, but no Monet. Something’s happening down here. Not Nems. Something different.’

‘I saw your video feed,’ said Voss. ‘Bring her back to the station. The planet’s too dangerous now – we’re preparing all staff for immediate evacuation.’

Ann watched through the dock-pod screens as the lifter carried her over to the science station. It wasn’t much to look at – just a circular plastic drop-hab next to a bioceramic landing strip built on stilts over the tunnel-backs. A shuttle squatted there with engines warming.

Their lifter reversed its docking pod straight up against the shuttle’s hatch. Ann knew then that Voss had to be in a hurry. It was the kind of risky manoeuvre that got pilots fired under ordinary circumstances.

Ann was unclipped and pushed inside.

‘Do you have any spare ship-suits?’ said Ann as she stumbled into the shuttle’s cramped cabin. ‘I’d like to get dressed, if that’s okay.’ She pointed at her damp, vegetation-spattered body.

Hoxer shot her an impatient look and pointed at the one female member of his team.

‘Lee. Get her dressed.’

The shuttle SAP printed her up a towel and a one-piece to wear. Lee watched like a hawk while Ann dressed. Why a female guard now, after fifteen minutes of high-speed nudity? The situation struck Ann as ludicrous but she kept her thoughts to herself. Any unexpected input would just slow the soldiers down.

She didn’t resist as they locked her into a crash couch and headed into orbit. Leaving the gravity well took longer than she’d have liked, but that would have been true however she’d escaped. The entire process had been much faster and smoother than if she’d tried for freedom. Now she had a problem, of course – that of wrenching control from Voss and the others. Hopefully her shadow would be up to that task.

As soon as they hit the station, Hoxer marched her to the command deck. The place had been cleaned since Ann was last there. The bloodstains and bullet-scars had vanished. So had about half of the officers. The place felt deserted. Ann suspected the senator was getting ready to pull the plug on the whole operation.

[
Could you take over the computers again, please?
] Ann asked her shadow.

[
No need,
] it told her. [
They still haven’t found my control inserts from last time. Their systems are yours whenever you want them. And don’t worry about the guards – they’ve been breathing your exhalations for the last ninety minutes and I now have smart-cell encampments in their lungs. Tell me when you’d like them gone.
]

Breathing her exhalations? Evidently her shadow retained some agency, as well as Will’s persona. She wondered what else it was up to.

Parisa Voss looked Ann up and down as she approached, her expression one of tightly managed anger. It was supposed to hide the animal terror that oozed out of her every pore.

‘Tell me what happened,’ said Voss.

No hello. Not even any criticism. The senator had to be desperate to figure out what the hell was going on. The League had clear strategic objectives for outlier scenarios. They’d be trying to retain control of their assets while reducing the number of destabilising variables. Their focus would be on owning the aftermath of the Nem invasion, whatever chaos the machines had caused. Voss had brought her back here for one reason: to strengthen her rapidly weakening hand.

‘Will and I tried to escape to warn Earth,’ said Ann. ‘We got caught in the fight and ended up on Snakepit. Will interfaced with the planet in a bid to keep the human race alive and I came back up here to finish off what we started. I’ll be leaving shortly.’

‘Oh, really?’ snapped Voss. ‘You think we’re just going to let you walk out of here? You think that because you read the tea leaves about Nem complexity you have some sacred responsibility to rescue Earth? For your information, your input has already been factored in. Nelson was prepping to leave to support the defence of Earth when Snakepit started interfering with control of the
Ariel Two
. Sam’s probability assessments have been de-emphasised and his directives marked as unreliable. The League
will
own the aftermath of this debacle with your help or without it, Ms. Ludik. As it is, your inability to detach from Will Monet has made that process far more complicated than necessary. You have a lot to answer for.’

Ann felt a desperate laugh bubbling out of her throat.
Inability to detach.
That was one way to put it.

Voss recoiled, her face darkening. ‘I’m sorry. Did I say something funny?’

‘Listen to me, you slack-witted political hack,’ said Ann. ‘I told you this would happen when things started running out of control. You failed to listen. I don’t know what your fallback plan is now, but my guess is it’s to boser the planet using the
Chiyome
, get the hell out of here and try desperately to pretend that none of this is your fault. That’s usually how it works, isn’t it?’

The look in Voss’s eyes told her she was right.

‘I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough,’ said Ann. ‘The Nems aren’t taking orders from their homeworld any more, which means they’re free to build new nests. Snakepit’s the least of your problems. The first new nest site they have in mind is probably Earth. They’ve already reached something close to human-level reasoning, which means that all your clever plans to spare the home system from carnage are way out of date. How long do you suppose the other colonies will last after that?’

She waited for an answer, but Voss just glared at her like a cornered animal.

‘You’ve kicked off the extinction of the human race,’ said Ann. ‘Well done. And that’s why I’m leaving – to clean up the stupid mess you’ve made, if I possibly can.’

Ann could see the loathing swelling behind Voss’s eyes.

‘You sound mighty sure of yourself for someone who’s being considered for execution.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Ann.

She pulled on the restraints. They came apart like butter.

[
Now,
] she told her shadow.

The guards’ eyes rolled up in their heads and they flopped to the ground like puppets. At the same moment, every screen on the command deck flickered and died. Will Monet’s face appeared on the main viewing wall, a dark smile curving his mouth.

Ann grabbed Voss’s jacket and lifted her off the ground with comic ease.

‘Bioblocker!’ Voss shouted. ‘Bioblocker now!’

Nothing happened.

‘Disabled,’ said Ann. ‘Wouldn’t have worked anyway.’

‘You’re not Ann Ludik!’ said Voss. ‘You’re
Monet
!’

‘Close but no cigar,’ said Ann. ‘Will never looked this good. And now we’re all going to start behaving like rational people. How about it?’

18.4: MARK

As the shuttle lost line-of-sight with the constructorbot, Mark’s grip on its pilot-SAP fell away. The colonists overcame their shyness almost immediately. Warning pings started appearing in his sensorium with messages attached.

‘
Gulliver Shuttle Two
, you are to land at the supplied coordinates in the desert, otherwise we will bring you down.’

A volley of twenty ground-to-air missiles raced towards them from a remote station somewhere far beyond New Luxor. Mark had to kick in a program of evasives before they’d even gained fifty kilometres of altitude. The shuttle banked hard.

‘One minute they want this boat, the next they’re trying to blow it out of the sky,’ he said as weapons screamed past their wing. ‘Can’t these bastards make up their minds?’

‘I don’t think they’re being super rational right now,’ said Zoe.

Mark snorted. ‘They haven’t been rational since they tried to floor me in a game of constructorbot smackdown.’

‘We have no idea what Sam told them,’ she reminded him. ‘He doesn’t have a great track record for honesty.’

Mark flew with half his mind and threw the rest into co-opting the missiles’ onboard controls. Zoe was right. Had the colonists been thinking anywhere close to clearly, they would have fired their missiles with something other than a standard rotating-format security protocol. Under the pressure of Will’s hackpack, their guidance systems cracked like raw eggs. Mark directed the missiles into each other’s paths only to discover that the colonists had decided to dive orbital tugs into Carter’s thermosphere in an attempt to prevent him from reaching the
Gulliver
.

‘I hate these people,’ Mark muttered. ‘I just want to
leave
. Is that too much to ask?’

He bounced his connection to the
Gulliver
via the Fleet station hanging above them and undocked the starship from its tether. The
Gulliver
adjusted its position, sliding into a lower, faster orbit.

‘You want to try nudging a starship?’ he said. ‘Please, go on, try.’

They did. Several small robotic ships impacted against the twenty-kilometre-wide wall of the
Gulliver
’s exohull, leaving barely a trace of their existence. Mark swung the shuttle up, dodged between obstacles and docked on the move, the shuttle’s hull clanging from the force of their impact. Fortunately, he managed to not smash the docking machinery on the way in. As soon as he had a join, Mark instructed the starship to pull them away from Carter with more conventional thrust than was strictly legal so close to an inhabited planet.

Fusion torches ignited all across the
Gulliver
’s back, blasting Carter’s atmosphere with a hammer-blow of superheated ions. Parabolic shock waves of glowing cloud rippled out behind them as they tore away. Mark gritted his teeth as they put distance between themselves and Carter’s racing shoal of improvised munitions. Only when he was sure the tugs couldn’t chase him did he allow himself to relax. He sagged into his crash couch with a moan.

‘Finally,’ he said. ‘I never want to see that place again.’

‘Now for the really difficult part,’ said Zoe. ‘We can’t fly the
Gulliver
home until we’re in control of the rest of the ship, and it’s only a matter of time before the Carterites find something bigger to throw at us. We have to get you down there and plugged into that helm. Sam knows that and he’ll be somewhere in that habitat core waiting for us.’

Mark rubbed his eyes, feeling excitement and dread in equal measures. Sam would have something twisted cooked up for them, he felt sure. And yet the fear that idea brought was tempered by Mark’s urgent desire to drive a fist into the man’s face.

‘Is there any way you can override that stupid security set-up so I can see the whole interior?’ he said.

Ironically, as soon as he reached the
Gulliver
’s mesohull, his grip on the ship’s functions would get weaker, not stronger. His hold would vanish the moment he entered the security-locked cabin and only bounce back once he reached the Fleet section of the habitat-core.

‘Not from in here,’ said Zoe. ‘We need full helm-space and robot control.’

‘Then there’s no point in waiting. I’m going down there to sort this shit out.’

There was nobody else who could do it. Zoe wasn’t in any shape to face Sam, even in zero-gee. Her feet were still useless and she was doped to the eyeballs on muscle-relaxants and pain-suppressors. Mark would have to handle Sam alone. He unclipped and started towards the airlock.

Zoe eyed him anxiously. ‘You’re not dealing with the FPP any more,’ she said. ‘This is Sam Shah we’re talking about and he won’t be in a friendly mood.’

‘I know that.’

‘Then don’t be in such a hurry!’ Zoe snapped. ‘He’s going to fuck with your head. That’s what he does. You need to start thinking like he does otherwise he’ll finish us. Tell me what he’ll try next.’

Mark exhaled. ‘He won’t want me to reach the bridge, so he’ll wake Citra up and use her as a human shield. He knows I won’t want to kill her.’

‘Agreed,’ said Zoe. ‘What else?’

‘He might paint the walls with neurotoxin like he did last time.’

‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘We can fix that from here. The shuttle has a printer. We can put together a skin-suit for you with gloves.’

‘He’s going to be armed,’ said Mark.

‘Yes. But so will you. This shuttle was built for first contact, remember? There’s a pair of recoilless automatics in the shuttle’s security locker with magazines of plastic rounds. Keep going.’

‘He’ll use his eyes in the science and diplomacy sections to set up an ambush,’ Mark added, the difficulty of his situation setting in. ‘And I have to get through the diplomacy section to reach the bridge.’

Zoe broke into an evil grin. ‘That’s what he
thinks
he’s going to do.’ She started typing furiously on her touchboard. ‘I’ll be simulating a soft assault the moment your docking pod gets down there. We use the paranoia built into this ship against him. If the
Gulliver
even sniffs a computer virus, everything locks. The entire network will go down. Screens. Cameras. Everything. He won’t have eyes for at least five minutes while the security SAP figures out I’m bluffing, then everything comes back up. If you get to the helm before that, flag me and I’ll reboot manually. But you’ll have to reach the fat-contact in your couch. Everything else will be out.’

Mark slid over to the security locker, pulled out a gun and loaded it.

‘It’s a start,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep that bastard on the back foot for as long as we can.’

Zoe had the shuttle print him up a body-stocking that would keep Citra’s toxins off his skin without compromising his movement. Mark gratefully abandoned his paper smock and pulled it on.

‘First and foremost,’ said Zoe, ‘keep this in mind: that fucker is going to do exactly the opposite of what you expect. Don’t take your eyes off him for a second. Promise me.’

Her eyes implored him.

‘I promise,’ he said. ‘I didn’t intend to, in any case.’ He pushed himself over to the airlock. ‘Wish me luck.’ He grabbed a handle and waved as the door shut behind him.