Nemesis (61 page)

The pod ride down to the centre of the ship had never felt longer. Mark breathed deep, his heart hammering. His mood see-sawed between fear and rage. Somehow, one man in a starship core scared him more than a planet full of angry colonists.

The pod thudded into place. Mark grabbed a handle and pulled himself flat against the wall. Then he waited. Five seconds later, the monitor screens died and came back flashing incursion warning symbols. The lighting turned red. Sirens sounded briefly and fell silent.

Mark hit the manual override on the door and held his breath. No bullets flew in. He glanced quickly over the lip of the hatch and darted back. Nothing lay beyond except the
Gulliver
’s spotless corridor. Black and red incursion warnings glowed from every surface. Not having eyes in the walls set his teeth on edge.

He slid quietly into the habitat core, angling his automatic to cover the ambush point at the closest intersection. He paused as soon as he was inside, listening hard. Nothing carried on the air except the soft hiss of the
Gulliver
’s fans.

‘Don’t shoot,’ said Citra Chesterford.

Mark’s heart skipped a beat. His gun slid instinctively towards her voice.

‘Come out, then,’ he said, ‘and keep your hands where I can see them.’

She floated in front of him, her eyes full of judgement. ‘We don’t want any more bloodshed,’ she said. ‘You’ve done enough.’

Mark’s heart pounded. He scanned her rapidly to make sure she wasn’t carrying a weapon and then slid his eyes back to the ambush points. He hadn’t expected an early surrender. Sam was out-thinking him already.

‘Where’s Sam?’ he snarled.

‘The bridge,’ she said. ‘He knows that’s where you want to go so he’s waiting for you there to make a point. We’re not going to fight you, Mark.’

Mark emitted a dry half-laugh. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’m sure.’

‘I’m here because we knew you’d kill Sam on sight if you met him first,’ said Citra. ‘He’ll come out when I give him the all-clear. You have a witness now. Maybe that means something to you, maybe not. Maybe you’ll just kill me, too.’

‘Professor Chesterford, you are one deeply confused woman,’ said Mark, ‘but frankly I don’t care what kind of bullshit fantasy you’re living in any more.’ He gestured with his gun. ‘That way,’ he said. ‘You first.’

Citra slid down the corridor in front of him. She moved slowly and carefully, making a point to keep her hands visible. Mark gritted his teeth and focused on the corridor’s intersections. He barely breathed during the short journey to the bridge.

They reached the doorway. It had been left open.

‘Are you still in there, Sam?’ said Citra. ‘You can come out now.’

‘No,’ snapped Mark. ‘Tell that slimy fuck not to move.’

She eyed him with dismay. ‘Are you going to kill him?’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ snapped Mark. ‘Right now I’m planning on leaving that to the Fleet tribunal.’

‘That’s rich,’ said Sam Shah from around the corner. ‘After what you’ve done.’

Coming back aboard the
Gulliver
was like entering an alternate reality. But what else had he expected? Until Sam ditched him on Carter, he’d lived in that delusional state himself.

‘In,’ Mark told Citra. ‘To the back of the room.’

‘You want us both in there?’ she said. ‘There’s not much space.’

‘Both of you. I want Sam’s back against the wall.’

Citra floated through the doorway. Mark edged carefully around the opening, keeping his weapon aimed. Citra and Sam hovered in the narrow area that ran along the left side of the crash-couch bunks, as requested. Sam’s expression was one of exhausted disapproval. He looked Mark’s suit up and down with evident disdain, as if poison had been the last thing on his mind.

Mark glared at his adversary, thinking fast. A double surrender – there had to be something wrong here. For starters, Sam was still keeping up a stream of lies for Citra. He’d only bother with that if he had a reason.

‘Congratulations,’ said Mark. ‘I anticipated the tricks you’ve already used. Ambushes. Poison on the walls. That kind of thing. You’ve surprised me yet again.’ He kept his tone light, trying to sound indifferent. Meanwhile, his heart thudded in his chest, waiting for the inevitable ploy.

‘We’re just saving time,’ said Sam wearily. ‘And hopefully some lives. You boxed us up in here and took away our comms. You shut down our network and arrived with a gun. It was pretty clear you meant to take back the ship, whatever we were trying to achieve. This way, maybe we can convince you to see reason and help some of those people down there.’

Mark didn’t bother replying to Sam’s bullshit patter. The bastard would only build on it.

‘What now?’ said Citra.

Mark drifted slowly into the room, sliding up to the captain’s bunk while keeping his gun on them the entire time. Something about the situation felt deeply wrong. With his free hand, he felt around behind him for the fat-contact. It took him twenty seconds to locate it without moving his eyes away from them to look.

He drew the cable up to his neck only to find it dead. He registered a moment’s surprise. In the same second, a shadow fell across the doorway. Mark pulled himself to the wall just in time as a plastic round shot the gun from his hand. Ash stood there in the doorway, his face a rictus of rage.

‘Kill him!’ Sam yelled. ‘What are you waiting for?’

Mark lay trapped in the bunk, prone and easy to shoot – a perfect set-up, yet again. He grabbed the bunk’s handles and threw himself towards the door-wall in a crouch. Ash swung into the room to take aim.

‘Traitor!’ Ash wailed, his voice cracking.

Mark pivoted on one handle, twisted and kicked out with his right foot as Ash moved in. Ash’s gun fell from his hand, bouncing off the wall. By then, Sam was scrabbling for Mark’s automatic. Citra was in the way.

Mark slewed out of the bunk feet-first, repeatedly kicking Ash in the face as he came. Ash batted his feet away, but Mark’s hands were in the air by now, reaching for both weapons. Before he could grab them, Ash seized him by the knees and yanked, using the doorway for leverage. He dragged them both back into the corridor.

‘You’re going to pay,’ Ash screamed.

‘For
what
?’ Mark shouted back.

‘Mind rape!’ Ash shrieked, his voice hysterical with indignation. ‘What do you think?’

Mark fought down his outright shock that Ash was still alive, along with his confusion over the accusation. He focused on grabbing Ash’s arms as the two of them bounced against the corridor wall. Under ordinary conditions, Ash wouldn’t have lasted five minutes against Mark. But Mark was half-starved and Ash fought like a man unhinged.

As they tumbled against the padding, Sam grabbed a gun. Citra picked up the other. She fired, narrowly missing both roboteers as they twisted over each other.

‘Don’t fire till you have a clear shot!’ Sam told her.

Mark corkscrewed and kicked against the wall, sending Ash and himself sprawling down the passage towards the ladder to the lounge. Mark angled around, his feet running along the walls and ceiling as he tried to turn Ash’s back towards the guns.

Another ill-timed bullet whined past him. Mark’s desperate evasions gave Ash an upper-body advantage. He snatched a hand free and went for an eye-gouge. Mark blocked frantically, trying to fend him off while Ash’s fingers clawed over his cheek. Ash’s face hung inches from his own. The look on it was one of a man dying inside.

Mark kicked at anything and everything, struggling to reorientate himself. At last his feet caught the top rung of the ladder. He dragged them both down and then propelled them at the ceiling. He knocked Ash’s head into the padding as they hit and tried to cram it there. It gave him enough purchase to get Ash’s hands free from his face and neck.

Sam slid fast along the passage below, his body aimed like a torpedo. Mark knew he’d left his back exposed. Sam had a clear shot. He swung Ash’s body awkwardly around, trying to realign his human shield. This brought Ash close enough to kick Mark in the kidneys, which he did with relish, over and over.

Then the network came back on. Mark seized on their surprise and threw Ash’s own memory package back at him – the one he’d sent while Mark was trapped on Carter. He used Will’s hackpack to force Ash to run it. Whatever Ash believed was going on now, maybe he’d recognise his own memories. Ash hesitated, stunned. His eyes glazed over.

Sam moved down the corridor, angling again. Mark twisted as bullets thudded into the padding beside him. He curled and sprang off the ceiling, sending Ash and himself spiralling down the tube into the lounge the wrong way up. While he had the advantage, Mark followed Ash’s package with a memory dump of his time in the penitence box, squeezing it into Ash’s mind. Ash whimpered and went stiff in his arms as Mark forced the memory into him, wedging it down the throat of his interface.

Mark watched Ash’s expression melt from one emotion into another: shock, dismay, despair and finally a kind of terrible resolve. They hung locked and frozen in a wrestling grip, the crash couches over their heads, as Sam came in for a fresh shot.

Ash suddenly brought his legs up against Mark’s chest and sprang away in Sam’s direction. He snatched the gun from Sam’s hand in an eye-blink and brought the handle repeatedly down against Sam’s face.

‘Stop!’ cried Sam.

But Ash’s arm became a blur. Sam struggled weakly as his blood spattered across the lounge.

‘Ash, stop!’ Mark begged.

Citra flew in then with a gun in her hand, pointed at Mark. Mark kicked it from her fingers and caught it as it rebounded off the wall. He fired a warning shot, clipping Ash’s arm as the gun stock threatened to fall into Sam’s face yet again.

Ash spun away, clutching his arm. He curled in on himself and began to keen like a sick animal.

‘Everybody freeze,’ said Mark, breathing hard. ‘This is fucking
over
.’ He pinged Zoe in the shuttle outside. ‘We’re in,’ he said, watching Sam’s body turn slowly in the air at the centre of a cloud of wobbling scarlet droplets. The man’s face was a mess. Without a med-bay, Mark couldn’t tell if he was still alive. Citra regarded him with eyes full of unadulterated loathing.

‘It’s not pretty down here,’ he said, ‘but we’re in.’

18.5: WILL

What Will had in mind wasn’t betraying Snakepit, exactly. He just didn’t want to be a god. The promise of ultimate power, he’d learned, was also the promise of ultimate loneliness, and he’d lived with that for long enough already. So Snakepit would have to survive with a submind replica of him or nothing at all. Will was ready to die to ensure that outcome. He’d already faced death once today. Doing it a second time felt far less dramatic.

Was that a selfish decision? After all, Snakepit would still exist without him and the risk that the mutants might reclaim it remained, despite the power he now held over them. But Ann had both the smarts and the cold pragmatism to torch the planet if he didn’t get off it. Either way, Will’s ascendancy to ultimate power was permanently off the menu.

For the first time in his life, he actually felt glad that the Transcended had prevented him from making complete copies of himself. Before his trip to Davenport, he’d assumed there was simply a limit to how much data a smart-cell could hold, and therefore how much of his persona his subminds could physically contain. But on that day it became clear that the Transcended had actively blocked him from copying himself by somehow writing a restraint deep inside his operating code. Now, ironically, that same code gave him his one hope of not living out eternity as a galaxy-spanning deity.

Will brought up a set of SAP design tools and started assembling a copy of himself in the planet’s substrate. The world responded with incredible eagerness, opening up oceans of resources for him. Then, slowly, Will started detaching his threads of control from himself and handing them to the replica. Snakepit had bound itself close enough to him that it took just seconds to figure out what he had in mind.

The museum metaphor smacked back into place with a force that made his nerves shake.

The curator looked up at him with eyes full of pain.

‘What are you doing?’ she said. She reached for the octopus-orchid on his lapel.

Will brushed her hand away. ‘Leaving,’ he told her. ‘You gave me control, remember? I can do that now.’

‘But why?’ she cried. ‘I thought we had an understanding!’

She looked shocked at his duplicity. Apparently, the curator had not yet figured out the difference between untruths and lying by omission. She still had a lot to learn about the human race.

Clouds parted in Will’s mind and suddenly he could feel the planet’s hunger more keenly than ever – an aching well of loneliness large enough to drown empires. It only tightened his resolve further. If that was what godhood felt like, he wanted no part of it.

‘But you won’t be alone,’ said the curator. ‘You’ll have me!’

‘You’re not real,’ said Will sadly. ‘You’re a part of my imagination – a picture of someone I once knew.’

The curator grabbed her hair in fists. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Don’t say that! Don’t leave me here like this! I can’t stand it.’

Will backed away slowly down the aisle between the ranks of cryptic exhibits.

‘Think about all the good you could do if you stay!’ she cried. ‘You might make all the difference for the human race. Who would be better than you at ushering in a new age of reason and hope?’

Will struggled with that because he still believed he could help. But he didn’t like what power had done to him last time. He found it hard to believe he’d be a better person with a million times more.

‘I regret that it’s necessary,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back with a better solution for you, I promise. Real people – thousands of them. Not manufactured hybrids. And not just me. But right now, you need to let me go.’

At first she looked as if she might have bought into his vision. She hesitated, suspending her scrabbling attempts to regain control. But as Will retracted his network of influence still further, the curator began to scream. Through his extended senses, Will felt organs the size of small countries start to fail. Oceans roiled. With his every uncoupling, parts of Snakepit’s already damaged matrix shut down. He wondered suddenly if the planet would actually prefer to die rather than carry on with just a shadow for company, even given the promise of his return. He hoped they could both do better than that.