The Machine Awakes (6 page)

Avalon took the bait. “Contact? The creature Zworykin was talking about?”

Sebela looked away, the light of the desk lamp casting the side of his face into a deep shadow, his eyes glittering in the gloom.

“Izanami…” he said.

Avalon watched him carefully. It seemed like he had stopped blinking, stopped breathing.

“Sir?”

Then he turned back to the light, and she saw tear tracks running down his cheeks. “If you don't mind, Commander, I have a speech to write.”

He didn't move, didn't take his eyes from her face. She drew breath to speak, then thought better of it. She stood and snapped a salute.

He nodded in acknowledgment. “Commander.”

“Sir,” she said. Then she turned and marched out. At the double doors of the office, she turned around, but the Fleet Admiral had moved back to where she had found him, standing by the window wall, looking out at the city at night, the light on his desk dimming automatically to nothing.

There were two marines on guard outside the doors. Avalon glanced at the men who stood motionless, their rifles held crosswise in front of them, their faces invisible behind the visors of their combat helmets. On their chests were the inverted black triangles of the Psi-Marine Corps.

Avalon left as quickly as she could, unwilling to risk anyone else sensing her deepest, innermost thoughts.

 

4

Caitlin wiped the rain
from her eyes and leaned back into the tree. The bark was rough but soft when she pressed the back of her skull into it. Her arms loose by her sides, she trailed her fingertips over the bumpy surface behind her, and she closed her eyes, focusing on the tactile sensations of the tree, of the rain on her face and the way the rain collected around her eyes, which felt hot.

There was silence in her mind. Her brother hadn't spoken to her since this morning. And she'd had no message from her contact either. But that was okay. The mission was still a go. She took a moment to focus, to center herself, like she'd been taught at the Academy. A warrior's mindset was as vital as their physical prowess. She had a job to do, a mission to complete, and complete it she would. The only difference now was that her orders weren't coming from the Academy instructors.

She opened her eyes and leaned around the tree to see down the hill, toward the Fleet Memorial.

People were gathered already on the tiered seating that stretched ten rows back, an undulating mass of blue and olive Fleet uniforms, most glinting with chrome and gold, rising up against the huge creamy stone wall that arced like a half-buried seashell, its surface inscribed in microtext with the names of the war dead. At the front center was a lectern, and in front of that the caskets were arrayed, each draped in the flag of Fleet Confederacy. There were just six, but the number was merely ceremonial. The annual Fleet Memorial culminated, after the Fleet Admiral gave his eulogy, with the interment of hundreds, if not thousands of fallen personnel, their remains repatriated from every corner of Fleetspace. These burials happened daily, of course, but once a year the routine became ceremonial and symbolic. Fleet Day was a day of remembrance for everyone.

In front of the caskets, the temporary stage dropped down, its edge lined with marines in full dress uniform. Then the dignitaries and invited families of the fallen, facing the lectern, their backs to Cait's position. Then the general public. And at the back, closest to Cait's vantage point, but still more than a kilometer away down the gentle slope of the hillside, were the media, reporters, producers, and technicians alike hustling for position as drone cameras hovered over their heads. The light drizzle didn't seem to be bothering anybody. It was just a heat shower and would pass in minutes.

Cait had watched this ceremony several times in the past from the comfort of her family home. She wondered if some members of that same family—members she hadn't seen for weeks now—were sitting down there, waiting for the ceremony to begin. If they were, it was unfortunate they were about to be eyewitnesses to history, but the mission was the mission.

Cait pursed her lips and exhaled, forcing herself to relax. She could feel a tingle on her skin, that ever-present buzz in the back of her mind ramping up a notch. That wild, uncontrollable talent, threatening to make itself known again as her stress levels rose.

Enough,
she thought, clenching her jaw. And it worked. The feeling faded, not completely, but the power shrunk back, like a scolded pet. She was relieved, a little. She thought for a moment that maybe, one day, with help and training, she
could
control it. That's what her trainers had said, but at the time she hadn't believed them. There was something in their eyes, something in the way they looked at each other when they were talking about her that she hadn't liked. That was partly why she'd left, of course.

Partly.

Cait glanced up from the bustling proceedings at the bottom of the hill and cast her eye over the rest of the Fleet Memorial.

As a military cemetery, the Memorial was huge, a ten-square-mile zone crisscrossed with perfectly aligned headstones, with the giant wall of remembrance in the center at the bottom of a shallow basin, the edge of which was lined with trees—the perfect spot for Cait to set up. With a theater of war so vast, the front thousands of light-years across, the space was needed. Half of those interred here hadn't even been born on Earth, but all Fleet personnel were laid to rest at the Fleet capital, New Orem. It was a great honor.

Cait felt the bile rise in her throat, but swallowed it quickly and tilted her head back, opening her mouth a little to let rain water trickle in. Then she spat it out and rolled her neck.

Honor. Yeah, right.
That.

They'd brought back the remains of her brother's psi-marine fireteam a month ago—they said. It had taken them that long to untangle and identify what was left of each marine—
they said
—so they could be officially returned to each family, including the one that Cait didn't belong to, not anymore. Not since the lies, the betrayal.

The Fleet had a lot to answer for.

Cait turned back to watch the build-up to the ceremony. Not long to go now.

She'd been waiting, planning, for weeks, ever since she'd run out from the Academy and hit the slums of Salt City, following the mysterious directions left for her and the voice of her dead brother in her head. Their family had been trying to find her, she knew that. She had watched them, making sure their efforts were for nothing. If Cait was honest, she'd thought that keeping out of sight, buried somewhere in Salt City, would have been a far more difficult task. But her family—and the authorities, including the Academy staff who had just lost a valuable asset and potential psychic warrior—hadn't been able to track her. It had seemed strange at first. After Cait had entered the Academy, she'd been tagged, effectively becoming Fleet property. The manifest tag at the base of her brain should have made it impossible to escape, impossible to avoid detection and capture. But they hadn't found her.

Then she'd realized it must have been her …
talent.
She'd wanted to vanish, to disappear. And she had. Her mind, that part of it she didn't understand, couldn't control, not willingly, was shielding her, jamming the broadcast of her tag like the psi-marines could jam the communications network of the Spiders. She hadn't chosen to do it. She just … had.

Cait lifted the telescopic sight to her eye and squinted down toward the Wall of Remembrance, moving from one end of the row of caskets to the other. She wondered what they contained, because she sure as hell knew her brother, Tyler, wasn't in one of them.

Because Tyler Smith was alive, and she knew he was alive because she could hear his voice whispering in her head.

She was doing this for
him.

As she watched, the casket honor guard came to attention, and everyone stood.

Time for action.

Cait ducked down beside the tree and began unpacking black metal parts from her backpack. In just a few seconds, the sniper rifle was ready, the telescopic scope now slotted into the top.

Crouching, she braced the side of her long-barreled weapon against the tree, and once again looked down the sight.

“That's better,” she muttered. Connected to the sniper rifle, the scope now displayed a mass of data, a series of independent crosshairs moving over the faces of the officers standing on the tiers as they waited for the arrival of their commander-in-chief, the Fleet Admiral. Then the rifle's OS glitched and the image in the scope broke up into jagged horizontal lines. Cait tapped the side of the sight, coaxing the device to work properly. First the data overlay reappeared, then the image settled, rolling for a second before re-stabilizing.

Cait tracked the sight across the front row, picking out the officers and identifying their ranks. They were all here: the entire Command Council, representatives of the Academy and the Psi-Division, even the Fleet Bureau of Investigation. All branches of the Fleet.

The Psi-Division had the whole front row. Cait bit her bottom lip in an attempt to kill the laugh that threatened to crawl up her throat, the crosshairs bouncing in her vision as she did.

Of course they had the front row. The psi-marines were the ones in charge. They were the ones doing the real fighting too. Everyone knew that, of course, even if the actual detail was lost on the citizens of Fleetspace. But Cait knew how it worked, because she'd enrolled in the Fleet Academy in order to join their fight. To join the psi-marines.

It was pretty simple, the way they taught it at the Academy. The Spiders were just machines of war, their operating system an AI. But this AI was different than those developed on Earth. The Spider OS was a
gestalt,
the individual components of the machine collective—the individual Spider war machines—all linked to one another to form a single hive mind. And the only way to break the laws of physics and connect every Spider machine with every other Spider machine across the whole universe was to use a
psychic
computer network. Like the Spiders themselves, there was no official name for this enemy communications network, but soon enough every cadet enrolled in the Academy's psi-program—Cait included—began calling it what it was: the SpiderWeb.

And so the psi-marines, psychic warriors picked from the Academy intake, their natural abilities amplified and honed with technology, training, and pharmaceuticals, were the Fleet's most valuable fighting force, because while they were highly trained fighters, like all marines in the Fleet, they had an extra weapon available to them—their minds. They could attack the SpiderWeb, cutting the war machines off from each other on the battlefield.

Bingo. Turned out uncoupling the Spiders from each other had some useful effects, like locking their CPUs into infinite loops as the individual machine AIs tried to clear the psychic jamming. That left the Spiders vulnerable.

So while the regular troops kept them safe, the psi-marines would reach out and fuck the Spiders up from the inside. Of course, what the Academy downplayed was the fact that while they were on the offensive, fighting in a battlefield that didn't even exist in the real world, psi-marines were effectively helpless. The mortality rate among Fleet Marines might have been high—the price of war, Cait knew—but among the Psi-Marine Corps it was even higher.

There was other stuff the Academy deflected attention from too, but as Cait's training had progressed, leap-frogging other recruits, her remarkably strong psi-ability fast-tracking her into advanced classes—Alpha One, baby—she began to think they weren't exactly
hiding
something, but they were trying very hard to ignore it.

Because if the physical risk of being in a war zone and unable to defend yourself at precisely the most dangerous moment wasn't bad enough, psi-marines had other dangers to face. Prolonged psychic combat could burn out your mind, no matter how well trained, or prepared, or powerful. And if you survived the missions, and dealt with the stress, the strain, the trauma that wasn't physical but
mental,
sometimes psi-marines were …
changed.
Came with the territory, said the Academy trainers. That's just the nature of psychic warfare, they said. Because during an attack, the psi-marines would actually
share
their minds, their consciousness, forming a gestalt of their own to amplify their powers and push back against the infinite force that was the SpiderWeb.

And that kind of thing changed you, forever. The price of war, right?

So maybe if you made it through Academy training without your brain melting, and then if you weren't blown up or eaten, and if your brain wasn't fried, or your mind broken, if you didn't get flashbacks and panic attacks or depression and anxiety and schizophrenia, then maybe—
maybe—
you could make it as a psi-marine.

Like Tyler Smith had. Like Cait Smith almost had, before she realized the truth.

Cait adjusted her grip on the sniper rifle. The moment was so close now.

Tyler had been a good psi-marine. One of the best, according to his Academy test marks. So good they'd sent him out too early, to the front line, and no sooner had his fireteam dug in than the Spiders came, and then—

Cait let out a held breath and stopped herself. There was no time to disappear down that rabbit hole. It was getting busy now, down at the stage. The buzz in her mind came and went, came and went, like the lapping of a tide. She focused down the scope, the image it showed flipping again a couple of times. She tried to clear her mind. The image stabilized. She was back in the game.

Any. Moment. Now.

Cait lifted her face just a little and checked the ammo counter on the top of the rifle. Full tank. She rolled her neck and repositioned her shoulder against the sniper's butt, and focused on slowing her breathing, relaxing her muscles.