Rifters 4 - Blindsight (42 page)

I reached for the ladder. The ladder pulled away: the ship was bending in the middle and
down
had started to climb the walls. Sarasti and I swung towards the center of the spine like a daisy-chain pendulum.

"
Bates! James!
" The vampire roared. His grip on my wrist trembled, slipping. I strained for the ladder, swung, caught it.

"Susan James has barricaded herself in the bridge and shut down autonomic overrides." An unfamiliar voice, flat and affectless. "She has initiated an unauthorized burn. I have begun a controlled reactor shutdown; be advised that the main drive will be offline for at least twenty-seven minutes."

The ship
, I realized, its voice raised calmly above the alarm. The Captain itself. On Public Address.

That
was unusual.

"Bridge!" Sarasti barked. "Open channel!"

Someone was shouting up there. There were words, but I couldn't make them out.

Without warning, Sarasti let go.

He dropped obliquely in a blur. Aft and opposite, the bulkhead waited to swat him like an insect. In half a second both his legs would be shattered, if the impact didn't kill him outright—

But suddenly we were weightless again, and Jukka Sarasti—purple-faced, stiff-limbed— was foaming at the mouth.

"Reactor offline," the Captain reported. Sarasti bounced off the wall.

He's having a seizure
, I realized.

I released the ladder and pushed astern.
Theseus
swung lopsidedly around me. Sarasti convulsed in mid-air; clicks and hisses and choking sounds stuttered from his mouth. His eyes were so wide they seemed lidless. His pupils were mirror-red pinpoints. The flesh twitched across his face as though trying to crawl off.

Ahead and behind, battlebots held their position and ignored us.

"
Bates
!" I yelled up the spine. "We need help!"

Angles, everywhere. Seams on the shield plates. Sharp shadows and protrusions on the surface of every drone. A two-by-three matrix of insets, bordered in black, floating over the main ConSensus display: two big interlinked crosses right in front of where Sarasti had been hanging.

This can't be happening. He just took his antiEuclideans. I saw him. Unless...

Someone had spiked Sarasti's drugs.

"
Bates
!" She should be linked into the grunts, they should have leapt forward at the first sign of trouble. They should be dragging my commander to the infirmary by now. They waited stolid and immobile. I stared at the nearest: "Bates, you there?" And then—in case she wasn't—I spoke to the grunt directly. "Are you autonomous?
Do you take verbal orders
?"

On all sides the robots watched; the Captain just laughed at me, its voice posing as an alarm.

Infirmary
.

I pushed. Sarasti's arms flailed randomly against my head and shoulders. He tumbled forward and sideways, hit the moving ConSensus display dead center, bounced away up the spine. I kicked off in his wake—

—and glimpsed something from the corner of my eye—

—and turned—

—And dead center of ConSensus,
Rorschach
erupted from Ben's seething face like a breaching whale. It wasn't just the EM-enhance: the thing was
glowing
, deep angry red. Enraged, it hurled itself into space, big as a mountain range.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Theseus
lurched. The lights flickered, went out, came back on again. The turning bulkhead cuffed me from behind.

"Backups engaged," the Captain said calmly.

"Captain! Sarasti's down!" I kicked off the nearest ladder, bumped into a grunt and headed forward after the vampire. "Bates isn't—what do I do?"

"Nav offline. Starboard afferents offline."

It wasn't even talking to me, I realized. Maybe this wasn't the Captain at all. Maybe it was pure reflex: a dialog tree, spouting public-service announcements. Maybe
Theseus
had already been lobotomized. Maybe this was only her brain stem talking.

Darkness again. Then flickering light.

If the Captain was gone, we were screwed.

I gave Sarasti another push. The alarm bleated on. The drum was twenty meters ahead; BioMed was just the other side of that closed hatch. The hatch had been open before, I remembered. Someone had shut it in the last few minutes. Fortunately
Theseus
had no locks on her doors.

Unless the Gang barricaded it before they took the bridge...

"Strap in, people! We are getting
out
of here!"

Who in hell…?

The open bridge channel. Susan James, shouting up there. Or
someone
was; I couldn't quite place the voice...

Ten meters to the drum.
Theseus
jerked again, slowed her spin. Stabilised.

"
Somebody start the goddamned reactor
! I've only got attitude jets up here!"

"
Susan? Sascha?
" I was at the hatch. "Who
is
that?" I pushed passed Sarasti and reached to open it.

No answer.

Not from ConSensus, anyway. I heard a muted
hum
from behind, saw the ominous shifting of shadows on the bulkhead just a moment too late. I turned in time to see one of the grunts raise a spiky appendage—curved like a scimitar, needle-tipped—over Sarasti's head.

I turned in time to see it plunge into his skull.

I froze. The metal proboscis withdrew, dark and slick. Lateral maxillipeds began nibbling at the base of Sarasti's skull. His pithed corpse wasn't thrashing now; it only trembled, a sack of muscles and motor nerves awash in static.

Bates
.

Her mutiny was underway. No,
their
mutiny—Bates and the Gang. I'd known. I'd imagined it. I'd seen it coming.

He hadn't believed me.

The lights went out again. The alarm fell silent. ConSensus dwindled to a flickering doodle on the bulkhead and disappeared; I saw something there in that last instant, and refused to process it. I heard breath catch in my throat, felt angular monstrosities advancing through the darkness. Something flared directly ahead, a bright brief staccato in the void. I glimpsed curves and angles in silhouette,
staggering
. The buzzing crackle of shorting circuitry. Metal objects collided nearby, unseen.

From behind the crinkle of the drum hatch, opening. A sudden beam of harsh chemical light hit me as I turned, lit the mechanical ranks behind; they simultaneously unclamped from their anchorages and floated free. Their joints clicked in unison like an army stamping to attention

"
Keeton!
" Bates snapped, sailing through the hatch. "You okay?"

The chemlight shone from her forehead. It turned the interior of the spine into a high-contrast mosaic, all pale surfaces and sharp moving shadows. It spilled across the grunt that had killed Sarasti; the robot bounced down the spine, suddenly, mysteriously inert. The light washed across Sarasti's body. The corpse turned slowly on its axis. Spherical crimson beads emerged from its head like drops of water from a leaky faucet. They spread in a winding, widening trail, spot-lit by Bates' headlamp: a spiral arm of dark ruby suns.

I backed away. "You—"

She pushed me to one side. "Stay clear of the hatch, unless you're going through." Her eyes were fixed on the ranked drones. "Optical line of sight."

Rows of glassy eyes reflected back at us down the passageway, passing in and out of shadow.

"You killed Sarasti!"

"No."

"But—"

"Who do you think shut it
down
, Keeton? The fucker went rogue. I could barely even get it to self-destruct." Her eyes went briefly deep-focus; all down the spine the surviving drones launched into some intricate martial ballet, half-seen in the shifting cone of her headlamp.

"Better," Bates said. "They should stay in line now. Assuming we don't get hit with anything too much stronger."

"What
is
hitting us?"

"Lightning. EMP." Drones sailed down to Fab and the shuttles, taking strategic positions along the tube. "
Rorschach
's putting out one hell of a charge and every time one those skimmers pass between us they
arc
."

"What, at
this
range? I thought we were—the burn—"

"Sent us in the wrong direction. We're inbound."

Three grunts floated close enough to touch. They drew beads on the open drum hatch.

"She said she was trying to
escape
—" I remembered.

"She fucked up."

"Not by
that
much. She couldn't have." We were all rated for manual piloting. Just in case.

"Not the Gang," Bates said.

"But—"

"I think there's someone new in there now. Bunch of submodules wired together and woke up somehow, I don't know. But whatever's in charge, I think it's just panicking."

Stuttering brightness on all sides. The spinal lightstrips flickered and finally held steady, at half their usual brightness.

Theseus
coughed static and spoke: "ConSensus is offline. Reac—"

The voice faded.

ConSensus
, I remembered as Bates turned to head back upstream.

"I saw something," I said. "Before ConSensus went out."

"Yeah."

"Was that—"

She paused at the hatch. "Yeah."

I'd seen scramblers. Hundreds of them, sailing naked through the void, their arms spread wide.

Some of their arms, anyway. "They were carrying—"

Bates nodded. "Weapons." Her eyes flickered to some unseen distance for a moment. "First wave headed for the front end. Blister and forward lock, I think. Second wave's aft." She shook her head. "Huh. I would have done it the other way around."

"How far?"

"Far?" Bates smiled faintly. "They're already on the hull, Siri. We're engaging."

"What do I do?
What do I do?
"

Her eyes stared past me, and widened. She opened her mouth.

A hand clamped on my shoulder from behind and spun me around.

Sarasti. His dead eyes stared from a skull split like a spiked melon. Globules of coagulating blood clung to his hair and skin like engorged ticks.

"Go with him," Bates said.

Sarasti grunted and clicked. There were no words.

"What—" I began.

"
Now.
That's an order." Bates turned back to the hatch. "We'll cover you."

The shuttle. "You too."

"No."

"Why not? They can fight better
without
you, you said that yourself! What's the
point
?"

"Can't leave yourself a back door, Keeton. Defeats the whole purpose." She allowed herself a small, sad smile. "They've breached. Go."

She was gone, fresh alarms rising in her wake. Far towards the bow I heard the crinkle of emergency bulkheads snapping shut.

Sarasti's undead carcass gurgled and pushed me down the spine. Four more grunts slid smoothly past and took up position behind us. I looked over my shoulder in time to see the vampire pull the handpad from the wall. But it wasn't Sarasti at all, of course. It was the Captain—whatever was left of the Captain, this far into the fight—commandeering a peripheral interface for its own use. The optical port sprouted conspicuously from the back of Sarasti's neck, where the cable used to go in; I remembered the drone's maxillipeds, chewing.

The sound of weapons fire and ricochets rose behind us.

The corpse typed one-handed as we moved. I wondered briefly why it just didn't
talk
before my gaze flickered back to the spike in his brain: Sarasti's speech centers must be mush.

"Why did you kill him?" I said. A whole new alarm started up, way back in the drum. A sudden
breeze
tugged me backward for a moment, dissipated in the next second with a distant clang.

The corpse held out the handpad, configured for keys and a text display: Seizng. Cldnt cntrl.

We were at the shuttle locks. Robot soldiers let us pass, their attention elsewhere.

U go, the Captain said.

Someone screamed in the distance. Way off up the spine, the drum hatch slammed shut; I turned and saw a pair of distant grunts welding the seal. They seemed to move faster now than they ever had before. Maybe it was only my imagination.

The starboard shuttle lock slid back.
Charybdis
' interior lights winked on, spilling brightness into the passageway; the spine's emergency lighting seemed even dimmer in contrast. I peered through the opening. There was almost no cabin space left—just a single open coffin jammed between coolant and fuel tanks and massive retrofitted shockpads.
Charybdis
had been refitted for high-G and long distance.

And me.

Sarasti's corpse urged me on from behind. I turned and faced it.

"Was it
ever
him?" I asked.

Go.

"
Tell me
. Did he ever speak for himself? Did he decide
anything
on his own? Were we ever following
his
orders, or was it just you all along?"

Sarasti's undead eyes stared glassy and uncomprehending. His fingers jerked on the handpad.

U dislke ordrs frm mchnes. Happier ths way.

I let it strap me in and close the lid. I lay there in the dark, feeling my body lurch and sway as the shuttle slid into its launch slot. I withstood the sudden silence as the docking clamps let go, the jerk of acceleration that spat me hard into the vacuum, the ongoing thrust that pushed against my chest like a soft mountain. Around me the shuttle trembled in the throes of a burn that far exceeded its normative specs.

My inlays came back online. Suddenly I could see
outside
if I wanted. I could see what was happening behind me.

I chose not to, deliberately and fervently, and looked anyway.

Theseus
was dwindling by then, even on tactical. She listed down the well, wobbling toward some enemy rendezvous that must have been intentional, some last-second maneuver to get her payload as close to target as possible.
Rorschach
rose to meet her, its gnarled spiky arms
uncoiling
, spreading as if in anticipation of an embrace. But it was the backdrop, not the players, that stole the tableau: the face of Big Ben roiling in my rearview, a seething cyclonic backdrop filling the window. Magnetic contours wound spring-tight on the overlay;
Rorschach
was drawing all of Ben's magnetosphere around itself like a bright swirling cloak, twisting it into a concentrated knot that grew and brightened and bulged outward...