Rifters 4 - Blindsight (28 page)

I shook my head. "I just observe, that's all. I watch what people do, and then I imagine what would make them do that."

"Sounds like empathy to me."

"It's not. Empathy's not so much about imagining how the other guy feels. It's more about imagining how
you'd
feel in the same place, right?"

Pag frowned. "So?"

"So what if you don't
know
how you'd feel?"

He looked at me, and his surfaces were serious and completely transparent. "You're better than that, friend. You may not always act like it, but—I know you. I knew you
before
."

"You knew someone else. I'm
Pod-man
, remember?"

"Yeah, that was someone else. And maybe I remember him better than you do. But I'll tell you one thing." He leaned forward. "
Both
of you would've helped me out that day. And maybe he would've got there with good ol'-fashioned empathy while you had to cobble together some kind of improvised flowchart out of surplus parts, but that just makes your accomplishment all the greater. Which is why I continue to stick it out with you, old buddy. Even though you have a rod up your ass the size of the Rio Spire."

He held out his glass. Dutifully, I clinked it against my own. We drank.

"I don't remember him," I said after a while.

"What, the other Siri? Pre-Pod Siri?"

I nodded.

"Nothing at all?"

I thought back. "Well, he was wracked by convulsions all the time, right? There'd be constant pain. I don't remember any pain." My glass was almost empty; I sipped to make it last. "I—I dream about him sometimes, though. About—
being
him."

"What's it like?"

"It was—colorful. Everything was more saturated, you know? Sounds, smells. Richer than life."

"And now?"

I looked at him.

"You said it
was
colorful. What changed?"

"I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more."

"So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked.

Fuck it
I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know."

"How?"

I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered.

"I wake up smiling," I said.

"Grunts look the enemy in the eye. Grunts know the stakes. Grunts know the price of poor strategy. What do the generals know? Overlays and Tactical plots. The whole chain of command is upside-down."

—
Kenneth Lubin, Zero Sum

It went bad from the moment we breached. The plan had called for precise havoc along the new beachhead, subtly arranged to entrap some blood-cell-with-waldoes as it sought to repair the damage. Our job had been to set the trap and stand back, trusting Sarasti's assurances that we would not have long to wait.

We had no time at all. Something squirmed in the swirling dust the moment we breached, serpentine movement down the hole that instantly kicked Bates renowned
field initiative
into high gear. Her grunts dived through and caught a scrambler twitching in their crosshairs, clinging to the wall of the passageway. It must have been stunned by the blast of our entry, a classic case of wrong-place-wrong-time. Bates took a split-second to appraise the opportunity and the plan was plasma.

One of the grunts plugged the scrambler with a biopsy dart before I even had a chance to blink. We would have bagged the whole animal right then if
Rorschach
's magnetosphere hadn't chosen that moment to kick sand in our faces. As it was, by the time our grunts staggered back into action their quarry was already disappearing around the bend. Bates was tethered to her troops; they yanked her down the rabbit hole ("
Set it up!
" she yelled back at Sascha) the moment she let them loose.

I was tethered to Bates. I barely had a chance to exchange a wide-eyed look with Sascha before being yanked away in turn. Suddenly I was
inside
again; the sated biopsy dart bounced off my faceplate and flashed past, still attached to a few meters of discarded monofilament. Hopefully Sascha would pick it up while Bates and I were hunting; at least the mission wouldn't be a total loss if we never made it back.

The grunts dragged us like bait on a hook. Bates flew like a dolphin just ahead of me, keeping effortlessly to the center of the bore with an occasional tweak of her jets. I careened off the walls just behind, trying to stabilize myself, trying to look as though I too might be in control. It was an important pretense. The whole point of being a decoy is to pass yourself off as an original. They'd even given me my own gun, pure precaution of course, more for comfort than protection. It hugged my forearm and fired plastic slugs impervious to induction fields.

Just Bates and I, now. A pacifist soldier, and the odds of a coin toss.

Gooseflesh prickled my skin as it always had. The usual ghosts scrabbled and clawed through my mind. This time, though, the dread seemed muted. Distant. Perhaps it was just a matter of timing, perhaps we were moving so quickly through the magnetic landscape that no one phantom had a chance to stick. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe I wasn't so afraid of ghosts because this time we were after monsters
.

The scrambler seemed to have thrown off whatever cobwebs our entrance had spun; it surged along the walls now at full speed, its arms shooting ahead like a succession of striking snakes, slinging the body forward so fast the drones could barely keep it in sight, a writhing silhouette in the fog. Suddenly it leapt sideways, sailing across the width of the passageway and down some minor tributary. The grunts veered in pursuit, crashing into walls, stumbling—

—stopping—

—and suddenly Bates was braking hard, shooting back past me as I flailed with my pistol. I was past the drones in the next instant; my leash snapped tight and snapped back, bringing me to a dead drifting stop. For a second or two I was on the front line. For a second or two I
was
the front line, Siri Keeton, note taker, mole, professional uncomprehender. I just floated there, breath roaring in my helmet, as a few meters further on the walls—

Squirmed...

Peristalsis
, I thought at first. But this motion was utterly unlike the slow, undulating waves that usually rippled along
Rorschach
's passageways. So
hallucination
, I thought instead— and then those writhing walls reached out with a thousand whiplike calcareous tongues that grabbed our quarry from every direction and
tore it to pieces
...

Something grabbed me and spun me around. Suddenly I was locked against the chest of one of the grunts, its rear guns firing as we retreated back up the tunnel at full speed. Bates was in the arms of the other. Seething motion receded behind us but the image stayed stuck to the backs of my eyes, hallucinatory and point-blank in its clarity:

Scramblers, everywhere. A seething infestation squirming across the walls, reaching out for the intruder, leaping into the lumen of the passageway to press their counterattack.

Not against us. They had attacked one of their own. I'd seen three of its arms ripped off before it had disappeared into a writhing ball in the center of the passageway.

We fled. I turned to Bates—
Did you see
—but held my tongue. The deathly concentration on her face was unmistakable even across two faceplates and three meters of methane. According to HUD she'd lobotomized both grunts, bypassed all that wonderful autonomous decision-making circuitry entirely. She was running both machines herself, as manually as marionettes.

Grainy turbulent echoes appeared on the rear sonar display. The scramblers had finished with their sacrifice. Now they were coming after us. My grunt stumbled and careened against the side of the passage. Jagged shards of alien décor dug parallel gouges across my faceplate, tenderized chunks of thigh through the shielded fabric of my suit. I clenched down on a cry. It got out anyway. Some ridiculous in-suit alarm chirped indignantly an instant before a dozen rotten eggs broke open inside my helmet. I coughed. My eyes stung and watered in the reek; I could barely see
Seiverts
on the HUD, flashing instantly into the red.

Bates drove us on without a word.

My faceplate healed enough to shut off the alarm. My air began to clear. The scramblers had gained; by the time I could see clearly again they were only a few meters behind us. Up ahead Sascha came into view around the bend, Sascha who had no backup, whose other cores had all been shut down on Sarasti's orders. Susan had protested at first—

"If there's any opportunity to communicate—"

"There won't be," he'd said.

—so there was Sascha who was
more resistant to Rorschach
's
influence
according to some criterion I never understood, curled up in a fetal ball with her gloves clamped against her helmet and I could only hope to some dusty deity that she'd set the trap before this place had got to her. And here came the scramblers, and Bates was shouting "
Sascha! Get out of the fucking way!
" and braking hard, way too soon, the scrambling horde nipping at our heels like a riptide and Bates yelled "
Sascha
!" again and finally Sascha moved, kicked herself into gear and off the nearest wall and fled right back up the hole we'd blown in through. Bates yanked some joystick in her head and our warrior sedans slewed and shat sparks and bullets and dove out after her.

Sascha had set the trap just within the mouth of the breach. Bates armed it in passing with the slap of one gloved hand. Motion sensors were supposed to do the rest— but the enemy was close behind, and there was no room to spare.

It went off just as I was emerging into the vestibule. The cannon net shot out behind me in a glorious exploding conic, caught something, snapped back up the rabbit hole and slammed into my grunt from behind. The recoil kicked us against the top of the vestibule so hard I thought the fabric would tear. It held, and threw us back against the squirming things enmeshed in our midst.

Writhing backbones everywhere. Articulated arms, lashing like bony whips. One of them entwined my leg and
squeezed
like a brick python. Bates' hands waved in a frantic dance before me and that arm came apart into dismembered segments, bouncing around the enclosure.

This was all wrong. They were supposed to be in the net, they were supposed to be
contained
...

"
Sascha! Launch!
" Bates barked. Another arm separated from its body and careened into the wall, coiling and uncoiling.

The hole had flooded with aerosol foam-core as soon as we'd pulled the net. A scrambler writhed half-embedded in that matrix, caught just a split-second too late; its central mass protruded like some great round tumor writhing with monstrous worms.

"
SASCHA!
"

Artillery. The floor of the vestibule irised shut quick as a leg-hold trap and everything slammed against it, grunts, people, scramblers whole and in pieces. I couldn't breathe. Every thimbleful of flesh weighed a hundred kilograms. Something slapped us to one side, a giant hand batting an insect. Maybe a course correction. Maybe a collision.

But ten seconds later we were weightless again, and nothing had torn us open.

We floated like mites in a ping-pong ball, surrounded by a confusion of machinery and twitching body parts. There was little of anything that might pass for blood. What there was floated in clear, shuddering spherules. The cannon net floated like a shrink-wrapped asteroid in our midst. The things inside had wrapped their arms around themselves, around each other, curled into a shivering and unresponsive ball. Compressed methonia hissed around them, keeping them fresh for the long trip home.

"Holy
shit
," Sascha breathed, watching them. "The bloodsucker called it."

He hadn't called everything. He hadn't called a mob of multiarmed aliens ripping one of their own to pieces before my eyes. He hadn't seen
that
coming.

Or at least, he hadn't mentioned it.

I was already feeling nauseous. Bates was carefully bringing her wrists together. For a moment I could barely make out a taut dark thread of freakwire, fine as smoke, between them. Her caution was well-advised; that stuff would slice through human limbs as easily as alien ones. One of the grunts groomed its mouthparts at her shoulder, cleaning gore from its mandibles.

The freakwire vanished from my sight. Sight itself was dimming, now. The inside of this great lead balloon was going dark around me. We were coasting, purely ballistic. We had to trust that
Scylla
would swoop in and snatch us once we'd achieved a discreet distance from the scene of the crime. We had to trust Sarasti.

That was getting harder by the hour. But he'd been right so far. Mostly.

"How do you
know
?" Bates had asked when he'd first laid out the plan. He hadn't answered. Chances are he couldn't have, not to us, any more than a baseline could have explained brane theory to the inhabitants of Flatland. But Bates hadn't been asking about tactics anyway, not really. Maybe she'd been asking for a
reason
, for something to justify this ongoing trespass into foreign soil, the capture and slaughter of its natives.

On one level she already knew the reason, of course. We all did. We could not afford to merely react. The risks were too great; we had to
preempt
. Sarasti, wise beyond all of us, saw this more clearly than we. Amanda Bates knew he was right in her mind—but perhaps she didn't feel it in her gut. Perhaps, I thought as my vision failed, she was asking Sarasti to convince her.

But that wasn't all she was doing.

*

Imagine you are Amanda Bates.

The control you wield over your troops would give wet dreams and nightmares to generals of ages past. You can drop instantly into the sensorium of anyone under your command, experience the battlefield from any number of first-person perspectives. Your every soldier is loyal unto death, asking no questions, obeying all commands with alacrity and dedication to which mere flesh could never even aspire. You don't just respect a chain of command: you
are
one.