The Machine Awakes (2 page)

The controller flipped through a few more pages on his datapad. “Fascinating,” he muttered, but he didn't look up. Klaus wondered whether he should answer, or whether his boss was talking to himself.

Klaus cleared his throat. There was something else about the signal bouncing between the Sigmas that he really needed to get an executive decision on.

“Strictly speaking, it's not outside normal operating parameters, but—”

“This is quite a storm, Mr. Klaus.”

Klaus paused. He nodded. “That it most certainly is, sir.”

The executive flipped through some more pages, nodding to himself. “Helium-3, tibanna, oxozone. Not to mention five percent vertrexan and zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-five percent lucanol.” He dropped the datapad onto his desk with a clatter and looked up at his chief engineer as he reclined in his chair. “Good work, Mr. Klaus. It's going to be a bumper payday for all of us.”

Klaus gave a small bow. “Well, I hope so, sir.”

“You hope?”

Klaus gestured to the datapad. “The behavior of Sigma mines Five and Forty, sir. We've run the signal they're bouncing to each other, but it's not a diagnostic code. To be honest, I'm not sure what it is. I've worked on these platforms nearly forty years and in all that time I've never—”

“Don't worry about the Sigma mines, engineer,” said the controller. He steepled his fingers and looked at Klaus with narrow gray eyes. “They can look after themselves.”

Klaus frowned, and locked his hands behind his back. “Well, sir, we can continue with the extraction, but I'd like to take Five and Forty offline for inspection. They're about due anyway.”

The executive rolled his chair closer to his desk and leaned his elbows on the glass top. “Postpone that inspection, Chief. I want full extraction on this storm. I don't want a single molecule of lucanol to be missed. Understood?”

“If we take the two platforms out, we've still got forty-eight converging on the storm. There should be no impact on extraction.”

“And there certainly won't be if all fifty are chasing it. Proceed as normal, engineer.”

With that, the refinery controller picked up his datapad and began reading something else. The chief engineer's audience was over.

Klaus gave another small bow. “As you wish, sir,” he said, but this time his smile was tight.

*   *   *

Dammit, this wasn't right.
There was something wrong with at least two of the mines. And the timing was less than perfect—if they lost the storm, if they didn't extract every single molecule of value stirred up from the depths of Jupiter, then the boss would have his guts. Klaus had no doubt about that whatsoever. The mines
could
look after themselves, that was true—but even so, that didn't make them infallible. Machines could break down. Computers—even AIs—could glitch.

The chief engineer strode away from the office and headed back toward the control center. It was a fair distance, easily traversed by elevator, but Klaus wanted to cool his heels. He took the long way, a brisk stroll around the curving orbital corridor of the refinery. The exercise would help clear his head and give him a few extra minutes to think.

What the
hell
was the signal from Sigmas Five and Forty? It made no sense—just a string of numbers. It sounded like quickspace coordinates, but the sequence was missing two digits. And while the transmission was garbled by the magnetic interference from the storm, the constant repetition between the two mining platforms had allowed them to check and re-check the signal. They'd got the whole thing. It was just … strange.

Parker had shown initiative, digging it out from what should have been a routine observation. Klaus wondered what he would have done, had he picked it up before the junior engineer. Probably nothing. The machine code chatter between the mining platforms was just so much background noise that Klaus had learned to tune out years ago.

Maybe he was getting old.

Klaus huffed and kept walking.

The refinery's orbital corridor had a continuous curving window that looked out into the Jovian cloud deck. The glow from Jupiter's atmosphere was bright, but Klaus found the purple-orange cast gloomy, the way it bleached the color from his own purple uniform and stained the otherwise gleaming white interior of the refinery into a muddy, dirty hue.

Huh. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe it was just routine. Maybe he'd made an issue out of it when there was no problem, the over-enthusiastic junior engineer casting unnecessary doubt into his mind. The robot mines knew what they were doing. Okay, so the engineers in the control room ran the entire JMC operation—in theory. But, the business of gas mining aside, the JMC's primary concern was really
automation.
Driven by pure profit, the corporation had pursued robotics and AI research to such an advanced level that its tech was way ahead of even what the Fleet itself—their primary customer—had. Gone were the days when the storms of the gas giants were chased manually, with pilots and their crews risking their lives aboard the giant extraction platforms. Hell, the Sigmas knew more about gas mining than even a veteran like Klaus. And he knew it.

But … it was bugging him. Something wasn't right, and Klaus was sure of it—forty years of gas mining had given him an intuition about things like this. The problem needed to be investigated and fixed, or something would happen and they'd lose the storm. And their bonuses. Let's see if the boss liked the sound of that.

Klaus nodded to another crewman passing from the opposite direction. Then he stopped and turned around.

The orbital corridor behind him was empty.

Klaus had stopped by an intersection, a point at which the wide corridor opened into a large, high-ceilinged atrium, complete with elevators and even seating. The space was designed to be open, something like a public square in a regular city, but the purple-orange Jupiterlight from the windows gave the whole place an eerie, dusky glow.

Klaus frowned. Whoever had passed him had vanished around the curve of the orbital corridor. He'd been distracted by his own thoughts, but it had seemed that the crewman hadn't been wearing the company uniform. Official visits from the Fleet were commonplace—there were always sales contracts to argue over—but, as far as Klaus knew, there wasn't a delegation due for several cycles.

Huh. It was nothing. His distracted mind playing tricks.

He turned back around and jumped in fright as he nearly ran into two people standing in the corridor—a man and a woman, dressed in black, their faces hidden behind featureless masks.

Klaus gasped, one hand reaching for the comm on the collar of his uniform even as he drew breath to ask the intruders who they were. But he was slow—the man raised a snub-nosed gun that spat a blue light with only a very high, short sound, and the chief engineer collapsed into the arms of the third intruder, who had reappeared behind him.

The murky corridor swam in Klaus's vision as he felt a deep, deep cold spreading across his body. He tried to focus, but saw nothing except whispering dark shapes looming over him.

A woman. “Quickly. Reboot. Use the data stick.”

A man. “Got it.”

Klaus felt something needle-sharp slide into his neck. He wanted to cry out in surprise, but he couldn't.

Someone else spoke, but their voice was a million miles away.

The woman replied, speaking, Klaus realized, into a comm. “Confirmed. Phase one initiated.” Then, louder, to her colleagues: “One down, twenty-three to go.”

And then the cold spread and the darkness grew, and Ramin Klaus's last thought was of the signal, and what the sequence
eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno
could possibly mean.

And then … then he saw a light. A bright, bright light.

 

THE BATTLE OF WARWORLD 4114

The machines were still
over the horizon, but even though the battle hadn't reached the marines hunkered down in the trench, the entire sky was lit by the fierce red-and-white aurora of suborbital bombardment.

Warworld 4114 was on fire.

In less than a cycle, the Spiders had swarmed over an entire hemisphere. Warworld 4114 was a hair smaller than Earth, an uninhabited lump of nothing, the surface alternating between thick forest and gray rocky plains. There was plant life aplenty. But animal life? Aside from the company of marines dug into the gray desert, waiting for the enemy war machines to arrive, Warworld 4114 was a dead planet.

A dead planet both sides wanted. The Spiders had moved first, as they always did, a Mother Spider seeding the world with millions of organo-mechanical babies, each the size of a dog, which landed and began consuming matter and growing and dividing and then
building,
until the machines now walking toward the marines' position were eight-legged monsters a hundred meters tall, their curved, knife-like legs carving the hard surface of the planet into rubble as they advanced.

The Spiders wanted the planet, which meant the Fleet wanted it too. The battle plan was simple: hold the machines back from suborbit—the U-Stars safely out of reach, the Mother Spider having departed as soon as its spawn had touched ground—until the psi-marines could dig in. Then, weakened and distracted by the aerial onslaught, the Spiders would be disabled by the psi-marines, their relentless march halted long enough for two smaller U-Stars—in this case, the
Seether
and the
Shutterbug—
to come in for the final, low-altitude kill.

So went the theory, anyway.

Psi-Marine Tyler Smith looked up, the HUD inside his helmet tracking the path of two more photonic torpedoes as they streaked across the sky, heading for the target. The U-Stars were doing a fine job, hovering in the upper atmosphere as they dumped munitions on the war machines. Tyler just hoped it was enough. There was no doubt the Spiders were getting toasted, but there were a
lot
of them. What they lacked in firepower and strategy was made up by sheer numbers.

The comms buzzed in Tyler's ear. Transmission incoming, battle command.

“Fireteam Alpha, Fireteam Bravo. Heads up, twelve o'clock.”

An amber indicator appeared in Tyler's HUD. He glanced to his left and to his right, the other members of his seven-man psi-marine fireteam giving the thumbs up as they all squatted below the lip of the trench. Tyler pushed himself off the trench wall and, still crouching, shuffled around. The amber indicator slid around his HUD until it was dead center at the top of his vision.

Straight ahead. The Spiders were nearly here.

An alert inside Tyler's helmet told him that Fireteam Alpha was also ready, a few hundred meters farther down the trench. Tyler lifted himself up, until his eye line was at ground level.

Down the left side of the HUD, text began to scroll as the U-Stars somewhere above began feeding data to his combat suit's computer. As the night sky bloomed in brilliant color once more, the horizon exploding in flaring white, the HUD began drawing small red boxes—two, then three, then four, then a dozen, then Tyler lost count. The icons buzzed around the horizon like insects; then his HUD finally settled as the icons flashed, locking onto the targets.

The machines stepped over the horizon, still too far away to see any detail against the glaring whitewash of the continued aerial bombardment. But there they were—black shapes, as tall as skyscrapers, lumbering toward them. As Tyler's combat AI fed the view to the other marines, the comms clicked to life and filled with chatter—not from the psi-marine fireteams, but the regular troops dug in half a klick in front of Tyler's trench. There were two hundred heavily armed Fleet marines between them and the Spiders.

Once again, Tyler hoped it was enough.

He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. Timing was key. He had to wait until the machines were close enough to make contact, but the Spiders were big, their giant legs covering alarming amounts of ground with each step. The window of opportunity was a small one.

Fireteam Alpha, confirm.

The communiqu
é
came not over the comms, but inside Tyler's mind. With his eyes closed he saw nothing but dull shapes moving across blackness, as his HUD continued to shine its light against his eyelids.

Fireteam Bravo,
he thought, linking minds with the other team leader.
Acknowledged.

There was a moment of nothing, of silence, of stillness and calm borne both of training and experience, as Tyler closed his mind to the outside world and focused in on himself. Psychic battle with the Spiders was just as dangerous as a firefight. But the two teams were good, and while they weren't carrying anything more than small plasma rifles, they were very,
very
well armed indeed. The psi-marines had weaponized minds, and the battle was about to commence.

Then Tyler heard it and opened his eyes. His comms stayed quiet, but a blue triangle flickered in his HUD as the psi-fi router in his combat suit picked up the signal and amplified it, spreading the data load across all of the psi-marines. The sound in Tyler's head made his heart race and made him feel infinitely small. It buzzed and clicked, a staccato nonsense that was half white noise, half something else. Something rhythmic. Intelligent.

The language of the Spiders.

Contact established.

Engage.

Across the plain, ahead of Tyler's trench, the ground flickered with blue sparks as the embedded marines opened fire with their plasma rifles. Above, the two U-Stars continued to fire, the scrolling text in Tyler's HUD showing their descent path and a countdown.

The clock had started.

Tyler dropped down into the trench and rejoined his fireteam, their backs turned to the oncoming machines, their eyes—like his—closed behind the opaque visors of their helmets.