The Machine Awakes (38 page)

“It is.”

“I get the feeling we need to get out of here.”

“Right again.”

“So let's get out of here.”

“Working on it.”

The rumble faded, and the main lighting came on. Kodiak stood. Did that mean Caviezel had got control again? They needed to leave. Now. He had to stop Braben.

“Mr. Kodiak,” said a voice from behind him. Kodiak spun around. A servitor had appeared from another corridor. Male, black hair, goatee. It nodded down the passage behind it.

“Glass?”

“Yes. Follow me, quickly.”

Cait tried to pull herself upright and, with Kodiak's help, got to her feet.

“I think I can walk,” she said.

“I can carry you.”

“I'm heavy.”

Cait took a step forward, but she was very slow. Kodiak glanced up and saw the servitor bobbing at the entrance to the passage. It waved at them to hurry up.

“You're not that heavy,” said Kodiak, sweeping Cait off her feet. She yelped in surprise, then grabbed Kodiak's neck as he jogged after the servitor.

*   *   *

Glass led them down
a maze of corridors until they came to a large arched doorway Kodiak recognized—the refinery's landing pad lay on the other side.

Kodiak fell into a crouch, balancing some of Cait's weight on one knee, as Glass worked on the door controls. “How did you operate the servitor in the control room when the others were out?” he asked.

Glass didn't look up from his work. “It took a bit of work, but I figured out how Caviezel had siloed his own systems inside the computer. I copied his methodology and managed to transfer into a servitor and reactivate it.”

“Lucky for me you did,” said Kodiak. Then he frowned. “But aren't
you
the computer?”

“Only part of it. The entire system is fragmented in an effort to stop the Spider infection. I am the last remnants of the JMC security protocols—and if I have appropriated Caviezel's transference programming correctly, I should be able to remain active even if the computer itself is destroyed or deactivated.” The servitor stood back from the door panel and looked at it. The door remained resolutely closed.

Kodiak raised an eyebrow. “Problem?”

“No,” said Glass. “The outer doors sealed when the refinery lost power. Just waiting for it to unlock.”

As the servitor spoke, there was a beep, and the doors slid open.

Kodiak hefted Cait in his arms and followed Glass out onto the landing pad. He paused to get a better grip on his charge at the bulkhead.

“I think I'm seeing double,” said Cait, craning her neck around.

Glass was halfway across the deck itself when he stopped and turned around. Behind him, beyond the rippling force shield, the Jovian atmosphere was in turmoil, a maelstrom of dark red and blue clouds whipped by hurricane winds. Farther out on the deck sat two Bureau shuttles, parked with their noses almost touching. The shuttles were identical in every way—a dull blue-black, roughly triangular in shape with a sloping delta wing. Fleet standard. One shuttle had brought Kodiak and Cait. The other, Kodiak realized, had been flown in by Braben.

Lightning, silent and brilliant, cracked across the sky. Cait flinched.

“Come on,” said Kodiak, adjusting Cait in his arms. As they headed to one of the shuttles, Kodiak couldn't resist looking up. The refinery, while apparently stable again, had sunk deeper into the Jovian atmosphere. At this altitude, it was far from the picturesque sunset it had been when they had arrived. The raging storm around them was a tumult, a tempestuous mix of multicolored clouds spinning and tearing like oil floating on water. Kodiak hoped they'd be able to fly out through the storm. But they had no choice.

They reached the front landing gear of the shuttle on the right, Glass supporting Cait while Kodiak busied himself with the access controls. As the access ramp descended, Kodiak picked Cait up and carried her aboard, the servitor following close behind.

Kodiak set her down in the doorway to the shuttle's cockpit.

“Ah, dammit,” he said, looking around as he stood up.

The cockpit had the standard pilot and co-pilot positions, but behind them, instead of seats for passengers, was a sarcophagus-like object with a curved top.

“You picked the wrong shuttle,” said Cait.

Kodiak nodded and ducked forward to the pilot's position. Cait struggled to her feet, leaning on the sarcophagus while Kodiak studied the control panel.

“Doesn't matter,” he said. “This shuttle is the same as the other. Fleet standard.” He turned to Cait. “Fly this thing out past the planet's magnetosphere and call for help. Glass will look after you, right?”

The servitor bowed its assent.

Cait stared down at the sarcophagus, her face lit by the blue glow coming from a window in the top of the object. “This isn't Fleet standard. What the hell is it?”

Kodiak joined her and peered into the object's window. It was empty, but the interior was padded. He had a sinking feeling he knew
exactly
what it was.

“Cold storage for your brother,” he said.

Cait's expression creased in confusion. “What?”

Kodiak waved at her and helped her get into the co-pilot's seat.

“Caviezel called Tyler his ‘experiment'—some project using the contract his company has to repatriate the Fleet's war dead.” Kodiak stood, scratched his cheek as he thought it over. “Tyler was supposed to have been killed in action, but instead he was grabbed—kidnapped—by Caviezel for his own use.”

“Flood said the Fleet was lying about the war. Could that be it?”

Kodiak shrugged. “Sounds like it. The Morning Star has a lot of strange beliefs about the war, but I don't think the Fleet is to blame for this. This was Caviezel.”

“The Fleet allowed it to happen,” said Cait, her expression dark.

Kodiak frowned. “Maybe. But not deliberately.” He leaned over the pilot's seat and set a prelaunch sequence into the control panel. There was a harsh
clump
from outside as the docking clamps disengaged.

“Okay,” said Kodiak, looking over his shoulder at Glass. “Can you fly this?”

Cait turned in the co-pilot's chair. “Hey,
I
can fly a shuttle.”

The servitor moved over to the pilot's position and seated himself. “You have been through significant trauma, Ms. Smith,” it said. “It seems prudent I pilot this vehicle.”

Cait slumped in her seat as Kodiak patted Glass on the shoulder. “As soon as you signal the Fleet, don't hang around. Push out of the Jovian system and wait for them to pick you up.” He glanced at Cait. “Commander Avalon is waiting for you to call. She'll send help. Stay out of the way and they'll get you into an infirmary on one of the U-Stars.” He nodded at Glass. “There will be a medical kit aboard the shuttle. Do your best to patch her up, okay?”

“Understood, Mr. Kodiak. But hurry—the wake of the orbital relay will be fading. You need to get after Agent Braben at once.”

Kodiak felt his lip curl. “Yeah, he's not so much an agent now, is he.”

Cait sat straight back against her chair and began strapping herself in, wincing in pain, gasping at the effort. “Get out of here. Go!”

Kodiak nodded. “I'll bring Tyler back, don't worry.”

He left the shuttle, punching the access ramp control on the front landing gear as he passed, and headed to the other ship.

*   *   *

Glass piloted the shuttle
away from the JMC refinery with textbook skill. As the barrage of lightning continued outside the ship, the shuttle rocking as it was buffeted by the hurricane winds, Cait watched the scrambled readout from the shuttle's comms deck. She glanced at the navcom display, which showed the simple escape vector Kodiak had set. The refinery had sunk a long way into Jupiter. They needed to clear the planet and then keep going, as far as seven million kilometers out to be sure they were clear of Jupiter's giant magnetosphere and the interference generated by the JMC mines. They had a long way to go, but once clear, all she had to do was open the lightspeed link and talk to Earth.

She leaned back in the soft seat and took a deep breath. Thanks to the emergency hypo Glass had emptied into her neck, the pain had eased to an all-over ache, like that time she'd gone ten rounds with an Academy combat servitor and had had her ass kicked five ways to Sunday.

The shuttle now following the escape vector, Glass turned from the controls and got on with cleaning her up. She winced, unable to stop her body jerking as the servitor wiped the blood from her face and neck. The sudden movement made her neck sing in pain. The feeling passed after a few seconds, falling to a steady white-hot burn from where the computer's interface spike had plugged into her. Glass gently pushed her to lean forward and began patching the wound. As it did, Cait looked up.

The view through the front screens was darkening rapidly, the turbulence fading as the shuttle rocketed through Jupiter's upper atmosphere. Soon stars were visible and a couple of dark shadows that the scrambled navcom managed to identify as the moons Io and Autonome.

The sensor readings showed something else too. An alarm sounded. Cait jumped in her seat, her body screaming in protest. She unclipped her seat's harness now that the rough journey through Jupiter's churning atmosphere had passed, resting on her forearms on the console as Glass set down the medical kit and returned to the pilot's position.

Hands on the shuttle's yoke, the servitor glanced at the sensor panel briefly.

“I don't want to alarm you, Ms. Smith, but I think there is something behind us.”

Cait nodded. “There sure is,” she said. She reached over and adjusted the sensory array to get more data. The shuttle continued to speed into open space in front of them, but the alert sounded again. Something
was
coming up behind them. Something big.

“Oh, crap,” Cait whispered.

“Ms. Smith?”

Cait flicked a control and the front screen switched to show the rear view. The starscape vanished, replaced by the orange, almost featureless expanse of the top of Jupiter's cloud deck. In the bottom right was a square, black object, the top of the JMC refinery.

Above it, in the center of the screen, the orange clouds rippled, a dark stain slowly growing in the center.

“What is that?” Cait whispered. But she knew the answer already. She just didn't want to believe it. She felt her pain ease as a surge of adrenaline mixed with the painkillers. She narrowed her eyes, fighting against the dizziness the mix caused.

And then her eyes widened as the machine rose from the Jovian cloud deck.

Black, spherical, the surface studded with smaller structures and panels, sensor arrays, antennae. It rose up out of the atmosphere, dwarfing the city-sized refinery framed against it.

Then darker spots, farther out, positioned at intervals around the central body. The spots grew until giant straight columns emerged from the clouds, growing in size and
moving,
reconfiguring themselves as they slid out from the main body and unfolded into giant legs.

Cait counted them.

There were
eight.

The Spider was complete. A giant war machine, constructed out of the Sigma robot gas mines that had been seeded around Jupiter by the JMC. The Lucifer machine, built by Caviezel.

“I advise we proceed with the utmost urgency, Ms. Smith,” said Glass.

Cait nodded, the fear and adrenaline pumping through her body, making her forget about her pain, her injuries. “Punch it!”

The servitor pulled the yoke with one hand and slid the shuttle's throttle forward with the other. The shuttle's drive roared, and with a sudden burst of acceleration, they sped toward open space.

 

PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

Standing in the shadows
on a high rooftop in the middle of the night, collar up, eyes open, waiting for a contact seemed like the worst clich
é
in the world.
And yet,
thought Special Agent Von Kodiak,
here I am.

Of course, it was clich
é
because it really
was
the best time and place for a secret meeting. And the Bureau had many informants, contacts, even spies, not just across New Orem and even Salt City, but across all of Fleetspace. Furtive meetings in dark corners were a common occurrence. They could be dangerous liaisons, but also valuable ones.

But tonight … well, this was a different kind of meeting, thought Kodiak. There was no informer en route, no mole or whistleblower hiding in the shadows on the rooftop. He was here to meet someone very special indeed. The message he'd received was surprising, but genuine. There was a time and a date and a place and a number. Time and date were no problem, and while he'd had to look up the place, he had found it easily enough. The number though, he knew already. Six digits. A Bureau badge number.

199900.

“You're early,” said Laurel Avalon, appearing out of the shadows to Kodiak's left. He smiled and gave a nonchalant shrug.

“I didn't have anything else to do,” he said. Like him, Avalon was wearing a long coat, although with her red hair catching the wind, it wasn't much of a disguise. Then again, standing on a dark rooftop at the edge of New Orem, it was highly unlikely anyone was watching. Which was exactly the point.

Avalon walked close to the edge of the roof. Kodiak followed. Together, they leaned on the railing. Kodiak cast his eye over the cityscape before them. New Orem stretched from horizon to horizon, with the glowing white cluster of skyscrapers of the Fleet capital directly ahead of them, right on the horizon itself.

“You didn't drag me right over to the other side of the city just to admire the view,” said Kodiak.

Beside him, the Bureau Chief chuckled. “It
is
a nice view.”