Black Hull (25 page)

“That’s the good news sir. There’d be no
way for them to return to physical form. We think it would transfer them to a
UCA database facility, highly secured. As long as nothing’s been rewired.”

“Good god Herek—you scared me.”

“There is one other contingency.”

Did I really hire this man?

Herek went on: “Sir,
The Greak Auk
has
a wormhole generator.”

“Should I cancel the damn bomb? Fifteen
seconds—don’t give me more bullshit, should I cancel?”

“Sir—it’s just—we can’t be sure they are
dead if they use the wormhole generator—after the Q-bomb, there’d be no trace
of them either way. We don’t even know if it works—it’s never been tested. As
you know, FOD stole it before it could go into trials.”

“I have a thousand men and a hundred
ships out there. Do I cancel?”

“Sir—I can’t make that decision,” said
Herek. He backed away in fear.

“Incompetent fool. Com up—This is Sirma,
I am ordering you to abort the Q-bomb. Repeat, abort the bomb. This is General
Sirma—Abort! Abort!”

Silence.

“Lieutenant! Do you hear me! Cancel,
that is an order, cancel the bomb!” the general screamed. Dead space replied to
him. A hum started, low at first, and then a roar, a bass-filled tremor cutting
into the office. A great wind of static leapt into the com signal, then gray
noise.

The signal dropped.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
yelled Sirma as his analyst crept toward the office door.

“Sir, we didn’t know ship still had the
equipment—remember, all personnel were killed, all the files were wiped. He
destroyed everything when he stole that ship—he stole the whole project!”

The general didn’t seem to care for
reason any longer. He dove forth and threw his fat hands around the temples of
the scrawny analyst. He drove the small skull down, crashing it against the
edge of his antique wood coffee table. A crack sounded. Sirma’s red hands
pumped up and down, until all that remained of Herek’s forehead were chips of
bone. When he’d had enough, and released all of his anger, he sat on his
leather couch. He drew close an uncorked vase of whiskey and poured a glass. He
drank and stared around at his opulence.
Why could anyone be as evil as that
man?
General Sirma couldn’t understand. He couldn’t imagine the logic
behind someone who saw it meaningful to end all of mankind. He did, however,
understand that there was now no choice but to lie—to affirm that the bomb had
gone off with one-hundred percent necessity—that there had never been any
doubt. That Herek had never produced the evidence for an escape scenario. The
families would get their lie, their maybe-truth, and they’d never know he’d
called off the bomb. Herek had a team of analysts under him. They’d also need
to be destroyed.

“Here it is, Melbot’s station. Should be
a piece of cake if FOD’s information is trustworthy,” said Jake—the name Axa
had given him. They descended upon a green moon of snow. The Fogstar landed
near a trail that led to an underground ramp.

“You return to deep orbit like we went
over, everything’s programmed already, just key in the autonav the way I showed
you,” Jake said. “I’ll be right up to meet you.”

“You sure you’re going to be able to get
their ship?”

“If I don’t, you take the Fogstar right
back to Organ World. Tell them I kidnapped you and you escaped.”

She didn’t want to think of the
possibility. As wild as she felt abandoning her born-into-profession of selling
her cellbot body, she felt even wilder now: she was starting to have genuine
feelings for the organ meat that had saved her.

“You’ll be there.”

“Don’t wait more than twenty-four hours.
If more time than that goes by, something’s gone wrong.”

“Jake?”

He didn’t look back.

“Jake,” Axa repeated.

“Yea, sorry, not used to a name just
yet,” he said, turning and smiling.

“You don’t look good,” she said as he
punched keys by the exterior hull door.

“We don’t last long when we’re
unhooked,” he said. “That’s why I have to get us to Utopia, fast.”

“Be careful.”

As much as it was a hoax, Axa had grown
to feel as if he really was her husband. He didn’t desire sex with her, which
had been the sole purpose of every other man she’d ever encountered. He wanted
to take her to the greatest place known to man, and that was all. She thought
about him withering away. She was not used to having feelings for others. On
the way to Melbot’s Station, Jake had tried to teach her the basic principles
of space flight, as they had been transferred to him somehow by FOD. When Jake
explained how he’d learned it, he only repeated what he’d said before—that FOD
somehow got
inside
his head, uploading and downloading data from his
consciousness.

Jake walked in on three droids.

“Everyone stop—don’t move a fucking
wire,” said Jake, pointing his pistol at them.

XJ, GR, and Melbot froze. Jake drew an
EMP gun from his other holster.

“You, I said don’t move,” he told Melbot.
Melbot ignored him and tried to activate his alarm system, a small toggle by
the lab door. Jake shot twice and Melbot’s life faded from his robot eyes. His
droid body crashed into the wall.

“You two, where’s Mick Compton?”

“GR, what should we tell him?”

“Don’t lie to me. I know you just sold a
shipment together. Where is he?”

“Better tell him XJ. He seems serious,”
GR said.

Axa sat up from her infirmary bed. Her
head was throbbing.
How long have I been sleeping?

She wandered naked down the corridor of
a strange ship that she’d never seen before. Voices talked. She crept slowly to
the end of the hallway, then pressed her ear against the wall. It was Mick and
someone else, a voice she didn’t recognize. Fear spiked in her. Something had
gone terribly wrong. Her body ached, her legs, her…

I’ve been raped.
She looked down,
saw welts. Her stomach was covered in them, though they’d begun to rapidly
heal. Something caught her ear from the other room.

“The one in the back, for example. Axa,
you said?” said the unidentified voice.

“That’s right,” Mick replied.

“That’s another example of what humanity
is, what it’s evolved
into.
She’s one of a trillion, bred for a single
purpose, a life of sex slavery. Created for that purpose, dying for that
purpose. You know where she came from?”

“I don’t know—her husband tried to kill
me—stole Sera’s plastic and her ship.”

“Lies. She doesn’t have a husband, never
has. Sexbots don’t. That was an organ body that robbed you.”

“How do you know?”

“I sent him.”

“What?”

“Needed someone who wasn’t trackable,
someone with the lowest chance of catching a taint. Because it always, always
leads back to me.”

“What’s an organ body?”

“What it sounds like.”

“Why the hell did you send him after
us?”

“You’re the next step. When Carner informed
me of you, with
no
plant whatever, I had no choice. You were the final
piece to the puzzle. It was…
serendipitous
.”

“To rob me blind, strip us of our ship?”

“Of course, the organ didn’t prove trustworthy.
And so I played the fool. But I had no other choice. I was in another part of
the galaxy accomplishing something far more relevant for the creation of the
G10.”

“He split, stranded us.”

“He was supposed to bring you through
two zones, undetected, so that you could assist me. I planned to reimburse Sera
and you with whatever you wished. Her, a ticket to Utopia, so she could live
out her time there, before the G10 hit. And you, the plantless bastard you are,
a ticket to time-travel back to your dilapidated point in history.”

“Well you fucked that one up.”

“I have the most advanced expancapacitor
body available, and the best tech on a ship known to man, but the .HUM that
runs through my cerebral housing is no different than any other human’s. I’m no
robot.”

“I might argue that.”

“The organ, he’s from a place called
Organ World. It’s one of a million just like it. People bred and raised for one
reason—so that the richest humans who wish to live
natural
, as it’s
called—no cybernetic parts—can have replacements when needed. That way, they
avoid the stigma of being a cyborg.”

“So that’s it? There’s a sex trade and
an organ trade, and you’ve given up on humanity? Enough to destroy us all?”

“Yes. But the rationale is much deeper
than sex worlds and organ worlds. Humans have subjugated everything around
them. All other forms of life have become the source of human pleasure. And
their own, unending lives, amount to eternal torture and suffering. It is hard
for me to make this clear to you. You may have come from a time period where
there was still hope for human tolerance, life rights, universal empathy. That
age is ended, ended long ago. Humanity is a virus.”

“You’re right, but I just can’t get it.
I see the good in people.”

“Are you willing to understand what I
understand?”

Another mind meld?

“That’s exactly what I’ll do, if you’re
open to the information that explains what humanity has become.”

Nothing can change how I feel, I’m going
home anyway. This future will be a faded memory once I’m back. Something to
ignore, something to convince myself never happened.

“Well?”

Mick nodded.

The conversation abruptly stopped. Axa
stepped back, saddened, reflecting on her own fate, a life of sexual servitude:
before Jake had taken her, she’d never thought differently from what she’d been
taught by the corporation. Suddenly, she desired to live free.
Freedom.
The idea was nonexistent before—now, it had been violently created. She’d
broken UCA law, been raped, continued to sell her body for plastic for a ticket
to Utopia, and somehow, through it all, felt alive more than ever before.
Where
are my clothes?

She paced back toward the medical
station when a noise scared her: GR appeared.

“Axa—you’re awake. Have you seen XJ? I
am trying to find him.”

“No—GR, where are my clothes?”

“Clothes? What a silly question!
Where
are my clothes!
” For some strange reason, incomprehensible to her, GR burst
into a robot laugh.

Conscious control of his own mind ended.
Mick entered the landscape of FOD, and through him, he experienced visions of
the reality FOD sought to destroy:

A planet appeared, dim and gentle green.
As if a bodiless spirit, Mick sped down toward its surface, and as he came
close to the arid landscape, he saw a tremendous lattice framework that covered
the surface of all the land. Upon each stretch of land spanned a construct of
silver bars, finely interwoven cages, stacked thousands of meters high. In each
cage cried the anguished heart of some animal. Some were recognizable, others
strange and new. Each one sounded with the rest to create a chorus of sadness,
fear and confusion.

These are the spirits of those that
humanity ignores. Why? Because they wish to consume their corpses. Is it
necessary for their survival in any way? No. But humans spread, consume, and
create for themselves, in as self-important a way as possible, a state of
luxuriousness that defies the reason nature bestowed them with.

Another planet appeared to Mick—this one
turquoise. Again he flew down, an incorporeal observer, and he soon came face
to face with an ocean world. There was no land on the surface, just as the
previous planet’s surface had been absent of all water. He flew lower, and it
seemed he would slam with tremendous speed into the rolling oceans. He passed into
the water, marveling that he could still breathe. He sunk toward the ocean
floor, devoid of human sense except for sight. In the gloom of the ocean
depths, a light appeared. Deeper and deeper he descended, until the light gave
form to another incomprehensibly large framework of metal. His speed increased,
and within each thousand-mile grid of piping he saw millions of sea creatures.
Housed within each cage were smaller cages. Each sea creature could not swim,
but squirmed ceaselessly, some fight to live taking place until it inevitably
died. Then he heard the whale cries: they rose, a deep hissing,  a chorus,
sonorously distinct, but in emotion the same as the anguish heard on the
previous world.