The Machine Awakes (3 page)

The sound in Tyler's head had reached a crescendo, so loud it felt like he was being physically crushed under the weight of it. Pain, hot and brilliant, shot through his eardrums, and then, behind his closed eyes, his optic nerve was lit by a wave of psychic feedback as his team opened up on the Spider communications web, throwing everything they had at jamming it.

But this … this was different. The pain, it was real. Tyler felt something warm and liquid roll down his cheeks inside his helmet. He screwed his eyes tight and screamed as he stared into the burning darkness.

The roar of the Spiders was agony without end. The screams of the psi-marines was pain beyond imagining.

The white light blazed, flaring golden, flaring blue—

*   *   *

Caitlin screamed and sat
up, kicking at the damp sheets tangling around her feet, her drenched T-shirt slick against her skin. For a moment she could see nothing but golden light flaring and hear nothing but the roar of the ocean. But as she opened her eyes and blinked and blinked and blinked she realized the glow was morning light reflecting off the gold mirrored glass of the building opposite her own, the shard of light shining through the unfinished wall of her refuge and spotlighting her as she sat on her makeshift bed. The roaring wasn't in her head, either. It was coming through the ceiling, the endless screech and thud of music so heavy it sounded more like an unbalanced shuttle afterburner.

She kicked the sheets clear, then leaned back and reached under her pillow. It was the only place you could keep valuables, and her most prized possession was still in place. Likewise her watch, which never left her wrist, not in a place like this. She rubbed her face and glanced at it.

Five
A.M.

Time to move. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, then paused.

She'd had the dream, again. As vivid as a memory, a flashback from battle, as if it had been her on Warworld 4114, crouching in the trench, facing down the marching Spider army with her mind as her weapon.

But it hadn't been her. She had never served the Fleet—never gotten that far. The memory belonged to someone else.

Her brother, Tyler.

Cait sniffed the air. It was warm already, although the breeze blowing in through the open wall of her twelfth-floor hideout was starting to make her shiver in her sweat-soaked underwear. Getting undressed to go to sleep was a risk—a place like this, you had to be ready to move, quickly—but it had been so fucking hot the last few nights, she'd decided to take the chance. Not that she'd been able to sleep much. The dream had disturbed her rest for most of the past two weeks.

With the music still thundering from elsewhere in the half-finished building, Cait quickly hopped across the floor, the concrete cool on her bare feet as she crouched down near the plastic crate where she had stashed her gear. That was another risk. She really should have kept the crate within arm's reach of the bed. She chastised herself for being sloppy, but that was the last night she'd have to spend in this dump anyway.

For two weeks she'd been living—if you could call it that—high in an abandoned, unfinished skyscraper on the edge of Salt City. Despite the slum's overcrowding, the skeletal building was only half-occupied by squatters—perhaps, Cait had thought, it was the proximity of the building to the shiny clean world of New Orem, literally just across the street, that put people off. The construction—half-finished fingers of building poking into the sky like the rotting ribs of a forgotten animal carcass—had been halted who knew how many years ago, a symbol of the Fleet's complete indifference to the plight of the giant slum right on its doorstep. Maybe that was another reason she'd found a hideout so easily. The people of Salt City didn't want any reminders of how the Fleet had failed them. The construction site, and the shell of the building in which Cait had made her camp, was just that.

That didn't stop scavengers, of course. As Cait got dressed, she padded over to the open wall and looked down at the rubble-strewn ground far below. The body of the last one she'd fought off was still down there, lying in a particularly inaccessible half-finished foundation pile. She hadn't intended to kill him, but she hadn't been able to stop herself. Backed into a corner, fighting not just for her life but for the
mission,
and … it had happened again. Her wild talent had come to the fore, acting almost like it had its own intelligence, taking over to protect her when she couldn't do it herself.

The scavenger had screamed all the way to the ground.

And he was still there. And she really
hadn't
meant to kill him—her talent, her
power
impossible to control, no matter how hard she tried. But since then, nobody else had come to bother her. She guessed his corpse—his screams—had served as a warning. Stay away from the woman on level twelve, north side. She's a crazy bitch.

Cait pushed the memory away, focusing on the here and now, controlling her breathing as she felt her heart rate pick up.

Because her talent was a frightening thing. And not just for scavengers or the trainers at the Academy who had seen something different about her, out of all the thousands of recruits who enrolled.

She was scared of it too.

She blew out her cheeks to calm herself, and she sat on her bed and pulled her boots on. Her outfit wasn't black as instructed, but it was comprised of the darkest things she still owned. The pants and boots
were
black, but the hoodie was dark navy blue, and the T-shirt underneath was light gray—there was nothing she could do there except keep the hoodie zipped to the neck. She stood and pulled a hair tie from her pocket, scraping her still-damp bangs off her face as she looked out to the spires of the Fleet capital, New Orem, glowing in the sunrise. It was a beautiful sight, despite the ruined surrounds.

The morning sky was clear, and when the chill breeze dropped Cait could feel the real heat beginning to grow, the sunlight already reflecting off thousands of immaculate mirrored buildings opposite her own incomplete shell of one.

Today it was time to head back into the city, because today was her brother's funeral.

It would be a military service with full honors, to be held at the Fleet Memorial, a vast cemetery on the other side of the city. Cait had worked out a route, had run it a few times to make sure it was okay. It would take three hours to get into position, as instructed. The service was due to start at one in the afternoon. She had plenty of time, but she knew she needed to get in and set up before it got too difficult.

Cait turned from the open wall and lifted her pillow. Beneath it was a slim black backpack. As she picked it up, something hard clanked inside. She unzipped the top, made sure the objects inside were secure, and slipped it on.

She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath.

I'm ready,
she thought.

The breeze picked up, pulling at her hair.

I'll see you soon, sis,
said the voice of Tyler Smith inside her head, as real as her own thoughts.

Cait opened her eyes and smiled. She reached down into the plastic crate and took out a small canister of liquid. She flipped the cap, poured it over her bedding, and then walked backwards, splashing the liquid around as much as possible before tossing the container back into the crate. She took two steps down the open stairwell at the back of the room, then pulled a disposable lighter from her pocket. She flicked the flame and watched it for a moment, then threw the lighter. Immediately, her former accommodation was engulfed with thin, pale flames.

Caitlin Smith turned on her heel and jogged down the stairs.

She had a funeral to interrupt.

 

PART ONE

EARTH

 

1

The robot servitor bay
was cramped, the air rich with the chemical tang of ozone and disinfectant. Von Kodiak did his best to ignore both discomforts as, balanced on one foot to reach the open access panel in the bay's back wall, he delicately touch-soldered an exposed circuit board while holding a bundle of wires between his teeth. The service bay was almost completely dark, but the HUD in his AI glasses amplified what little light there was, allowing him to get on with his work.

Kodiak was squeezed awkwardly in one of two channels, each a meter deep and a meter wide, that ran the full length of the bay on either side of the central platform. They were designed to allow humanoid crews—
vertically challenged
humanoid crews, Kodiak thought with a sigh—a minimal amount of space to work on the cube-shaped maintenance robot that would be parked in the center. There was just enough room to stand upright in the channel, but the space was narrow and Kodiak had to lean out awkwardly to reach the access panel at the back of the dock—the alternative being to crouch in the center of the bay itself, risking life and limb if the servitor should return to port, crushing him between it and the back wall.

Kodiak had been working for two hours now, according to the counter in the corner of his glasses. He had a sore back, and he had already paced the tiny channel twice to walk out a cramp. He was almost done, but the last couple of connections were a son of a bitch. But the work, the effort, would be worth it.

Because Von Kodiak's new plan was a damn good one, even if he said so himself.

The service levels of Helprin's Gambit, and the dozens of servitor docks they contained, were not on the usual visitor's docket. The station was a leisure facility, pure and simple, packed with spas and entertainment complexes, offering sensual delights both real and virtual, ranging from the family friendly to the borderline illegal as the facility lazily orbited a star just close enough to a major quickspace transit point to make it a tempting destination. But the station was famous for one thing above all else: the Grand Casino, which occupied almost the entire central spire of the torus-shaped pleasure palace. It was the biggest such enterprise in all of Fleetspace, privately owned and operated, a destination for the rich and famous and the poor and desperate alike.

It was also a front for one of the biggest criminal organizations in Fleetspace.

Kodiak tried to put out of his mind what they would do to him, and for how long, if he got caught. The new plan was a risk, but circumstances and the parameters of his mission had changed, and he'd had to come up with something else. And, really, the new plan was quite, quite clever. Okay, so it wouldn't have the same outcome as the original, but it was better than nothing. He was pretty sure the team would be pleased with the results.

Kodiak extracted one of the wires from between his teeth. As he held the bare end against the contact of his microsolder, there was a tiny puff of blue smoke, and the connection was in place.

The city-sized station needed cleaning robots. A
lot
of cleaning robots. The machines—
servitors
—were perfect cubes a meter and a half across, designed with the same aesthetic touch as the rest of the station. During the day, the army of machines was docked in their bays where they charged up, underwent maintenance, and, importantly, re-synced with the station's central computer via a hardwire link.

A hardwire link Kodiak was busy modifying. He hissed in annoyance as time ran on in the corner of his eye. He pulled another wire from his mouth and soldered it to the exposed circuitry on the panel in front of him. Just one more to go.

The service sublevels of Helprin's Gambit, sandwiched between the public levels, were monitored like every other part of the station—except for the inside of the servitor docks themselves. It was a security flaw that Kodiak had discovered months ago, soon after arriving and getting the lowly servitor technician job.

Of course, that wasn't the plan, but working as an anonymous tech was a great way to hide, especially after discovering his pre-arranged contact had been thrown out of an airlock by Helprin himself. Well, so the story went; he'd only got word secondhand, cycles later, while laying low and considering his options in one of the dive bars that dotted the outer rim of the platform, the less salubrious regions of Helprin's pleasure palace generally avoided by tourists but frequented by the poorer of his employees. Word was Helprin was looking for someone else too: a new arrival from Earth, his executed employee's co-conspirator.

Hello, Von Kodiak.

Every instinct in him had screamed to get the hell out, abandon the mission and make for the stars. Except he couldn't risk it, not until things had quieted down. Getting the tech job had been easy—now that the original plan had failed, Kodiak had an unfeasibly large amount of money on him with which to bribe the service controllers, who gave him a position, no questions asked. And, Kodiak told himself, it was just temporary. A few weeks, perhaps. He could use the job to hide in plain sight, and then when the coast was clear, catch the next transport off.

And then—thanks to his accidental employment—he'd found the security flaw and hatched a new plan. Because the servitor docks, which he was assigned to on a regular maintenance schedule, turned out to be the perfect place to discreetly hack the station's computer without being seen.

Last wire. Last connection. Job done.

Responding to his thoughts, his AI glasses ran a diagnostic over his handiwork, highlighting the solder points with a green indicator and matching the changes against a circuit diagram Kodiak had spent three cycles preparing. All good. Just another little touch-up here and there needed. Which just left another three cycles to continue his cover as the servitor tech, until the Grand Casino began its next Sentallion contest—his game of choice—and then he'd be off Helprin's Gambit in a shuttle loaded with credits before anyone, Helprin included, knew what had happened. And about time too. Six months of station maintenance was
more
than long enough.