Black Sun (Phantom Server: Book #3) (22 page)

Now.

I had groups of nanites ready. They headed toward their selected targets.

“I can’t lift her up!” Dominic croaked.

Dammit! I’d counted on the cargo terminal’s emergency protocol. Its automatics were obliged to rescue a civilian craft in distress and land it safely using specially configured power fields. But we were flying too low for them!

I noticed a small gap between two loading lines. “To the left!”

Overloaded, the second antigrav too began billowing smoke. We weren’t descending anymore: we were falling.

My heart throbbed, clocking down the moments until impact. The Reapers must have decided we were toast and switched their attention to the harpies. Just what I’d been waiting for. Their weapons were very effective against nanites. Immediately a few of the harpies’ outlines rippled and began to fade.

We’d lost our pursuing tail but we continued to drop toward the terminal buildings, unable to maintain altitude without the antigravs.

The flybot crashed into the fine latticework of loading machinery, breaking manipulators and ripping out supports. A few beams impaled the vehicle, penetrating both compartments.

The deafening rattle was followed by relative silence.

“You okay?” Dominic unbuckled and scrambled toward me, rubbing his injured shoulder.

“I’m fine.”

“Did it work?”

“It did! They began fighting each other.”

Indeed, the submachine gun fire rose to a crescendo and didn’t die down. The Reapers put up a good fight but the mobs in possession of the emergency command for nanite control kept pressuring them.

Dominic opened the emergency hatch and climbed out. He proffered me his hand.

I scrambled out too and took a look around. The flybot was firmly stuck in a tangle of construction beams. Its engines billowed smoke. The vehicle’s hull was breached in many places where some of the loading supports had pierced it.

The harpies circled overhead, their ranks considerably thinner. They would soar upwards, then dive, their bodies filling out with nanites with each attack, becoming more and more dangerous.

“What’s gonna happen once the codes expire?” Dominic asked warily.

“They should have done so already,” I honestly replied.

“Are you going to interfere?”

“Not yet. Let’s get closer.”

He cast another wary glance at the harpies. What was he so unhappy about? Let them clear our path.

We climbed down using the broken ends of cables. Now we were about a hundred and fifty feet away from the airlock which was slightly to our right.

“It’s there,” the Major pointed at a squat fortification next to the cliff’s edge.

* * *

Unexpectedly, the melee by the bunker took a new turn.

By now there were only five harpies left but now they easily sustained damage without losing any nanites. Had they evolved? Were they blocking some controlling code unknown to me?

I’d have loved to intercept it but I had no idea how to do so. Frequencies were packed with interference. Scanning produced no results. The micro transmitters that the Reapers were firing had a very small range. That was the whole idea, otherwise creatures other than the target might suffer from the transmission too.

Never mind. I was pretty sure that this bunker of theirs held prototypes of all sorts of weapons.

The mobs were getting desperate. Their cargonite claws ripped through the armored plastic of bunker fortifications with ease, making a quick job of the fake Corporate workers in passing. Their every blow tore out a large chunk of the Reapers’ technogenic flesh that would dissolve in cascades of fine purple spray.

The Major didn’t seem to like the harpies’ rushed evolution at all. “Zander, isn’t it time you interfere? Are you in control of the situation or what?”

“What’s your problem?” I pointed at the gravity elevator next to the airlock. With a popping sound, about a dozen Reapers were forced out of its depths onto a small platform at the center of the bunker’s upper structures. “Everything’s going according to plan. These bastards are smoking each other!”

“I think you’re making a mistake,” he prophesied. “It’ll stop any minute now. The Reapers aren’t that stupid. They’ll soon realize that their weapons aren’t effective anymore. Then they’ll retreat into the bunker. And we’ll be left here to face the monsters you’ve just built!”

I didn’t reply. Instead, I tried to activate Friendly Contact in an attempt to control one of the harpies. It failed. Friendly Contact was supposed to have worked! But somehow it hadn’t.

“Zander, what the hell is going on?”

“The mobs have evolved! They’re blocking the control code I sent them!”

“I told you!” he snapped. “Harpies are based on an AI prototype!”

Sending them the control codes had been too careless of me. That’s exactly how the Outlaws had lost control of Avatroid. I should have thought about that!

Shooting back, the Reapers retreated toward the elevator. They were too calculating to fight to the last man!

The five harpies drew near them, forcing their way into a narrow gap between two massive concrete glass structures. Their heavy wings flapped, raising clouds of white dust. Threads of electric charges crackled between their claws. The rapid increase in nanites had led to their developing new abilities!

“Dominic, I want you to stand close to me.”

The world faded into a distance. My mind expander reached its peak processing speed.

I focused on nanite control, taking the creatures’ steely wings into my grid sights.

I attacked with several Disintegrations in a rapid sequence. A series of blinding flashes obscured the sun. The nearest structures cast sharp deep shadows. The figures of the Reapers burst into fountains of molten steel. With a thunderous roar, the top part of the elevator shaft collapsed on itself. A web of deep cracks ran across the concrete glass.

The towers shuddered with the shock wave, dropping fragments of their façades.

My Active Shield ability kicked in. Flames flowed around us without touching.

You have used
784,578 nanites.

Your actions have had a destructive effect on a habitable planet’s environment.

Your Colonizer status has been temporarily blocked.

Warning! The Colonizers Council may decide to lower your Mnemotechnics Skill 10 pt.

For your information. The Colonizers Council isn’t available. The investigation and judgment of your case is not possible.

Your status has been restored.

The smoke of hundreds of fires obscured the panorama of the technopark.

Dominic and I stood amid the ruins of the installation at the very center of a fire-ringed circle that marked the boundaries of the Active Shield that had saved our lives.

The part of the road leading to the gravity elevator was no more. The enormous airlock gate had been deformed. Its supports had crumbled into shapeless chunks of concrete glass.

For no apparent reason, Dominic felt his helmet with his hands. He cast me a glance and turned away. A gust of wind blew the plumes of smoke aside, revealing the jagged outline of dozens of towers sporting collapsed upper stories.

I knew he was thinking I’d failed to keep my skills under control. He wasn’t right though.

In outer space it had been different. Ditto for space stations. Even when I’d had to attack Phantom Raiders, I still hadn’t had to utilize the same quantities of nanites, throwing them into the furnace of Disintegration. There it had been enough to burn through a small area of the ship’s hull, end of story. The ship’s equipment would immediately begin to fail, completing the damage.

Another deafening roar sent clouds of white dust into the air.

The massive airlock gate finally parted from its deformed frame, thudding to the ground.

* * *

Gradually the dust had settled. A dull red light seeped from inside the bunker. I could hear the far-off rumble of a rockfall.

I could scan traces of cargonite everywhere. The bulk of the precious substance had been lost to us but we had to try and collect what we could still salvage.

I activated Self-Replication (the ability I’d received at the same time as Colonizer). Soon a vague haze of newborn nanites enveloped me. A new indicator appeared in my interface: a shimmering bar which kept growing, the digits next to it showing the increasing number of nanites under my control.

“Shall we go now?” Dominic shuffled his feet, casting occasional glances into the darkly crimson depths of the elevator.

“Wait a sec. If you have something to say to me, you’d better do it now.”

He cracked a nervous smile. “Zander, I understand we couldn’t have destroyed the harpies any other way. They were made of nanites, weren’t they? You couldn’t have done it any other way. But I’m afraid it might not work down in the bunker. Do you have anything less spectacular?”

“Against the Reapers? I don’t think so. They’re immune to both System Failure and Critical Damage. The best thing I can do is Plasma Blast.”

“Then we have problems. We can’t just scorch everything in sight down there. The place is packed with unique equipment. We need to save it.”

“Save it for whom?”

“How about those who’re stuck in the virtual world?”

“Okay. Let’s have a think. Are there any labs anywhere near that used to study nanite control codes?”

He gave a confident nod. “Yes.”

“Change of plans, then. We need to check them first.”

“What exactly do you expect to find? From what I heard, there’re lots of codes. The problem is, most of them are fragmented.”

“Then we need to see, don’t we?” I said. “Show me the way!”

* * *

Everything was bathed in a dull crimson light. We walked up and down some tunnels, wide and deserted. The walls on both sides of us were lined with dozens of closed armored doors that led to all sorts of science and research centers. Our advance was occasionally hindered by emergency bulkheads. Those we had to bypass using a cramped system of service tunnels.

“It’s here,” Dominic checked against a scheme and opened one of the hatches.

We climbed down a vertical well to the level below and secreted ourselves amid the bundles of cables, listening.

An intense hum kept growing stronger, then weakening again as if someone in the room below was playing with a switch of a giant electric transformer.

I cast Dominic a quizzical glance. He shrugged. “No idea,” he mouthed.

Warily he opened the hatch a crack. A narrow strip of light cut through the gloom of the utility lines.

I touched his shoulder. “Wait.”

Earlier, we’d agreed only to use nanites as a last option. Dominic had warned me that most research equipment was fitted with sensors which raised the alarm whenever they detected any stray nanites. Such precautions were perfectly understandable, considering the kinds of technologies they had studied here.

I read the equipment’s signatures, trying to locate the alarm.

I found it. It was disabled: by the Reapers apparently, which was only logical.

So what was that hum down there?

The room was large, separated into several work zones by translucent floor-to-ceiling screens. Processor columns crowded its center. The room’s perimeter was lined with the square chassis of neurocomputers.

Directly below us in the room the floor was raised, forming a pulpit-like platform. It was connected to a multitude of cables and pipelines that ran under the flooring.

I continued scanning, engaging some nanites to help me with the data harvesting.

“The Reapers,” Dominic mouthed.

“Quiet. I can see them.”

Ten security guards in full military space uniforms paced the equipment-free area holding the already-familiar pulse submachine guns. I focused on their matrices. Those were Reapers, no doubt about it.

My mind expander outlined their weapons in red as factory-made. The rest of them were nanites, armor suits included.

Here too the odds weren’t in our favor.

I selected them as targets, allowing my mind expander to monitor them.

The enormous screens were filled with first-person views of various virtual worlds. Each picture contained additional information: the place’s coordinates, its correlation with location maps, and the distance to certain objects marked with unknown symbols.

“Dominic? What are those signs?”

“These are our bases in the Crystal Sphere,” he replied. “They’d been created before we started testing neuroimplants.”

And I’d thought I knew the Crystal Sphere inside out! “Are they still holding?”

“Destroyed. But not all of them are marked down here. There’s still hope they failed to locate a few.”