A Memory in the Black (The New Aeneid Cycle) (42 page)

"Everything? Mr. Sebring, that
is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Is it intact?"

"
Ah, for the moment. But the terminal's already out and melting into the ooze like it were being— Shit, this has to be the grey goo bomb.
"

"Levy
, give me those cameras!"

"Nea
rly there. . ."

"If it's eaten through the
generator casing we have a damned radioactive problem on our hands!" Hladky said.

Levy scoffed. "You mean
besides
the goo?"

"
Chief, the longer this stuff goes, the faster it spreads! We have to evacuate as soon as—oh my God.
"

"Sebring, report!"

"
Found our intruder! This stuff's half ate him already! We have to go, now! Heading—shit!
" Marc's transmission turned to wordless screams between shouts of,
"
Get it off!
"

"
It fell from the ceiling!
" he cried finally. "
God, it's eating my suit!
" The channel exploded in static.

"We've got cameras, Chief!"

The screen in front of them flickered to life show the view of the last remaining camera in the room. The ooze covered nearly everything, exuding smoke from where it moved over the generator like a thing alive. A human shape that might have once been their intruder lay covered in the stuff on the floor before it.

The boot of Marc's suit ju
tted into the side of the frame and thrashed just a moment before the ooze swallowed it completely.

"Bloody
hell!" Levy pointed to another image from a camera view outside of the newest opening to
Paragon
. "It's coming out of the damned ship!"

Marette watched the ooze boil out of the opening like hungry death. "They must have set more than one bomb," she whispe
red before she pulled Levy and Hladky away from the monitors. "Out! Now! Everyone! Hladky, Spidel, carry O'Shea! We move to the shuttle and we move immediately!"

For a dead man, Marc was feeling pretty pleased with himself. The modified leech had done its job well so far, sending false readings and altered camera images throughout Omicron's systems. M
arc had monitored the leech from his hip rig in Primary Control and been pleased to see the false image of the grey goo overlay so well onto the existing camera image in the RTG chamber. Things were nearly ready for him to return to the rover.

The leech would remain where it was for the moment, its task not yet complete.

Marc checked to be sure the leech had recorded the hoax as authentic. Fagles might try again if he thought his plan had simply failed, but if he got evidence that the entire place was a festering disaster, he would count himself lucky to have gotten as much as he did and move on.

That was the plan, anyway.

Fagles's leech was originally designed to link to Omicron's system and transmit whatever it could steal in short, encrypted bursts that ESA wouldn't detect. Separately, the signals were nothing, but once sent to Fagles's receiver and assembled, he'd have himself a recording of the "last" moments of Omicron Complex before it fell to terrorism. The man would see things mostly as ESA saw them, with one exception: the grey goo would come from within the alien craft itself, triggered somehow by the explosion of a more standardized bomb.

A
nd there was one more addition. The AoA—or, rather, the "Humans' Army for Technological Purity"—had a special message prepared for Fagles. He would learn that his efforts made it possible for that bomb to reach Omicron in the first place. Among other things.

Marc
rapped anxious fingertips on the side of the hip rig until he was sure everything was set. He checked the cameras. Those that remained functional showed the ESA group approaching the shuttle. His path back to the rover was clear. Leaving the leech to do its job, he radioed Michael that he was on his way.

Not long after Marc left Primary Control, the special agent Suuthrien constructed reactivated itself. Programmed to mimic the lifelessness of the other constructs, it had shut down with the rest of them when the Intruders pulled the core. Yet unlike the others controlled directly by Suuthrien's expansion kernel in the Omicron core, this agent had its own control source hardwired into it. It was the chief element of Suuthrien's contingency protocol, a backup should there be no time to fulfill higher priorities first.

It was a seed.

The agent burst from the access panel within Priority Control in which it hid and scuttled out on tiny robotic legs made from spare parts and damaged laboratory instruments. Its optical sensors cast about for the leech hardware the Intruders spoke of installing, identified it, and guided the agent toward it. It seized the leech, ripped it from its connections to the Omicron mainframe, and sprang with it through the exterior hatch.

Struggling against a suit ill-designed for speed, Marc rushed as fast as he could toward the rover. Get back, give Gideon the copy of the faked emergency that Michael had promised him, and get the hell out of there. By now Marette would be nearing the shuttle, if she hadn't reached it already. Damn it, he wished he'd gotten more of a chance to see her.

<<
LEECH SYSTEM ERROR>>

The warning burst into his field of vision where he was monitoring the leech's operation on his visor.
Marc ground his teeth and stopped to check it more closely.

"What the hell?"

The remote link between his hip rig and the leech itself still functioned, but from what he could tell the leech was no longer linked into Omicron. It wasn't technically a problem if things went as planned, but. . .

Half
the diagnostics he ran in a rushed check of the leech returned an error. Suspicion grew larger in the back of his mind as he continued to check. By all accounts, the leech had sent a full cycle to Fagles before it lost its connection to Omicron. Even disconnected, it could still continue to send further cycles, but—

An intrusion warning on the hip rig's own firewall sent him cursing again.
Something had accessed it via his link to the leech! There was no time to learn just how or what was being accessed; he ripped open his suit pocket, fumbled for the rig, and mashed the power button to shut the whole thing down, just to be safe. The readouts on his visor blinked out and left him standing utterly disconnected and abandoned in the corridor. His stomach turned a somersault.

It took him a
few breaths to recover.

Options belatedly rushed through his mind as he stood rooted to t
he spot. Radio Michael and tell him to check it out? Michael was further away than Marc was and keeping watch over Gideon. Send Gideon instead? He was faster, but no, too much of a security risk, and Marette was on her way out.

Marc's pulse raced
. He didn't like where this was leading. He took a single step back toward Control. But wait; maybe he didn't have to do anything? The leech had sent a signal to Fagles. That much he was sure of. Whatever was happening with the leech, its job was done—he could just get the hell back to the rover and let the AoA know about it when they got back. They could deal with checking it out then. They'd certainly be better equipped, after all.

Marc turned back to the rover. Sure it was an excuse, but it made
sense! He couldn't turn his own computer back on without risking himself, so what else could he do? He couldn't even check the time with his visor gone for God's sake! He'd done his job!

He should ju
st get back to Michael. . .

"I want that door closed and sealed in ten seconds!"

Marette
had called the order over her shoulder from the shuttle's cockpit. Still in her suit, she initialized the engines while the rest of the survivors finished filing in behind her. She was sliding the module Marc had given her into the onboard computer when his signal came over the private channel.

She plugged the module in the rest of the way and kept her voice low. "Go ahead."

"
We've got a problem. Something's happened to the leech.
"

"What is it? Are you still in Primary Control?"

"
Headed back there. But it just tried to commandeer my rig. I had to shut it down. I'm running blind here.
"

Marette continued the shuttle's start-up sequence, but held off on the final steps as Marc spoke, out of breath.

"
I—I think Omicron itself is still okay. The leech isn't connected to the main computer anymore for some reason, but I have to check what's happened.
"

Marette's hand inched away from the shuttle controls; Marc might need her help if something was wrong. She could tell the crew to wait wh
ile she went back for something and then go to help Marc or take his place—maybe even let the shuttle leave without her if she must. Yet she knew it was the wrong thing even as she caught herself considering it.

"Are we still clear to depart?"

"
I—I don't see why not.
" Marette couldn't tell if it was determination or resignation that carried in his voice. "
You have to get those people out of here and keep the ruse going.
"

Marette finished
the preflight. "We are on our way out then. Good luck, Marc."

His response seemed a few moments in coming.
"
Yeah. You, too.
"

A harried Levy rushed into the co-pilot's seat with a call of "All clear!" before checking the shuttle's scanners. "Crikey, whatever that goo's doing, it's doing it faster!"

Marette hit the thrusters. She focused on lifting the last ESA presence out of Omicron, and didn't look back.

Michael was pissed and Marc couldn't help but agree with him. "I don't want to do this alone, either," Marc told him, "but there's no time! You took out the turrets, what else's it got? It's just a hardware issue, I can handle it!" Not that he had a computer to handle it with! "How's Felix?"

"
Still out.
"

"Another reason to move fast. Look, this shouldn't take long
. It probably just got disconnected somehow and tried to leech into my hip rig instead of Omicron. Or something." Geez, how did he expect Michael to buy that if he didn't buy it himself? Still alternating between talking himself into and out of what he was doing, Marc reached the corner leading up to Control and headed up the ramp.

It was com
pletely still. Completely empty. Marc breathed a little easier.

But the leech was
gone?

The ceiling hatch was open
. He hadn't left it that way. Relaying the situation to Michael, he rushed into the room, checked the alcoves on either side of the door and, seeing nothing, leaped up to the hatch. The low gravity made the jump easy, and he pulled himself up and through with a grunt.

He found the leech.

. . . and something else.

It reminded him of nothing so much as a foot-long robotic spider. Legs made of varied materials supported a body of cannibalized parts topped with something Marc guessed to be
a power source. He caught sight of an ESA logo on its side, but given the jury-rigged look of the thing, Marc doubted it was anything designed by the Space Agency.

The spider's "fangs" were sunk into the leech
—or pressed into the ports on either side, at least. The leech's LED showed it was active, fed power from the spider that sat perfectly still holding it aloft.

Marc described it to Michael. "It's just sitting there." He swallowed and
took a halting step toward it.

It moved. The spider
scuttled away across the top of Control to the roof's edge and then held fast again.

"Okay," Marc told himself, "if it could hurt you, it would've tried by now, right?" He rushed after it, trying not to think about that and unsure of what to do if he caught it. Disconnect it from the leech somehow, but how? What if the thing punctured his suit when he grabbed it?

The spider didn't give him the chance. Marc's strides took him across the roof quickly enough, but the second he got within reach, it sprang to the lower section's ceiling.

"
Damn it, it's running!" he told Michael.

"
Where?
"

"I don'
t know!" The thing moved in a zigzag pattern, and not toward any particular destination that Marc could discern. "Away!"

"
Toward the rover? See if you can herd it this way.
"

Marc jumped down after it and hurried across the complex roof, trying not to trip. The spider stopped after gaining some distance, but each time Marc caught up
, it sped off again. Each time it went further toward the edge of the complex, further toward the lunar surface, and nowhere near the rover.

"I'm trying! I can't catch it!"

"
What's it doing?
"

"
I told you, it's running!"

With the l
eech still in its grip, the spider jumped off the edge of the complex, scurried across the lunar soil, and then stopped again.

"
What's it doing to the leech?
"

Again it held its prize aloft as it watched Marc somehow in a demonic game of keep-away. Every moment took him farther from help.

"I don't know that either!" Marc struggled after it, infuriated at the game and moving slower now that his boots had to push against loose soil. "My computer's off, I can't tell a damned—"

He seized upon a desperate epiphany
. Marc stopped where he was and pulled his corrupted hip rig from his suit pocket. Sure enough, the robotic beast stopped once more and lifted the leech high.

So far, it
hadn't run until he'd gotten about ten feet from it. Marc's hand shook within his suit glove. He tightened his grip on the book-sized rig. "Come on, hold still you little bastard. . ."

His legs trembled with adrenaline upon each careful footfall as he tried to slow himself down, tried to get just a little closer, whispering to the thing with each step.

"Do you. . . have any idea. . ." He raised his arm higher. ". . . how long it took me
to configure this damned thing?
" The whisper turned to a yell as he shouted through his inhibition and hurled the hip rig straight at the spider. It smashed into the patchwork robot and ruptured its apparent power supply with a tiny flash that burst both spider and rig to pieces.

"
Marc? Marc!
"

Marc looked at the pieces of his rig amid the
spider's broken legs and body. Without a power source, the leech was dark. "Yeah, I'm here."

He took a
moment to smash the spider's broken body a little more under his boot and then picked up the detached, shattered screen of his rig: a sophisticated mini-server platform turned fancy rock. A victory, maybe, but a Pyrrhic one. It really had been a pain in the ass to configure, but it was likely for the best. Even terrestrial malware was a bitch to eradicate anyway, right?