Scratch Monkey (32 page)

She suited up, letting her climb-spider lock itself into place around her and jack into her spinal reflexes. It felt eerie to own ghost limbs again, two arms poised behind her to sting machine death into anything that got in her way. She burrowed into the body-bag she'd had the axial factory prepare, forcing herself to breathe steadily despite the polythene claustrophobia wrapped all around her. It was an impermeable membrane, transparent, tough and airtight. Not a space-suit; an environmental precaution. There was no telling what the tapeworm could have grown into with six days of unsupervised ontological recombination.

Oshi wanted to get out very badly. She'd woken up eight hours ago from a dream of nameless terror and realised what was going on. Days of enclosure weighed her down; the thought of what was to come was even worse. There was one critical part to her plan, that Boris hadn't even alluded to: retreiving the gatecoder from the colony medicentre. It wasn't a standard inventory component, and the construction schematics for it weren't part of the general database she had. If she couldn't find it she might as well cut her wrists now and get things over with, rather than wait for the Ultrabright death machine to download the mind of its master program and go to work on the colony. When she charged up her suit backpack, switched to her internal air supply, and powered up the door motors, she was acting on cool-headed necessity rather than random impulse; but her motive was still a hollow dread.

She used the reconstructed airlock in what had been the entrance lobby to Anubis' castle. The doors hummed and slid out mechanically, exposing a view like a diseased eyeball. Oshi stood in the opening, unable to take in the perspective. A twilit red abyss opened beneath her feet, swooping into a dizzying space that somehow closed up into a pinprick pupil far away. A few metres overhead the grey bulk of the redoubt support plunged outwards, a dim red glow suffusing its surface from the light tubes high above. The veins of the eye were picked out in roadways and access routes between forests; in the dim reflection of running water and the blood-clot of a lake hanging overhead. Dim lights sketched out the habitats and houses of this world, the stumpy blocks of the life-support centres and transit nodes. But it was too quiet; the normal microwave chatter of the cyborgs and drones that populated it was gone. And a strange grey fungus was creeping outwards from a focal point in what had once been the necropolis at Memphis. If the view was of the inside of an eyeball, then its owner was very definitely dead.

The darkness was oppressive. Oshi edged her way out along a handrail until a ledge appeared beneath her feet. Then she reached out with her spidery arms and legs, grabbed hold of the wall, twitched a subverbal command to her exoskeleton. It jolted into autonomous life, carrying her out along the wall, down to the dying forest floor below. She permitted himself to feel a momentary relief, but there was too much wrong to feel normal.

The climb-spider began to run, skipping and sliding down the nearly-vertical surface until it began to pick up speed under the influence of the centrifugal effect. Then it began scrabbling to hold itself back, letting the world do the work. Gradually the slope bottomed out, until presently it was no more than a steep hill with trees growing on it at a strange angle.

She felt herself slow as the she reached a smooth, flat ribbon of road that ran between the trees.
Where to?
she wondered, indecisive, not wanting to commit herself to the finality of a decision. She looked round. There was a cat, lying curled peacefully beneath a bush to one side. Her vision amplifiers picked it out, along with the insects crawling over and through it. Patches of silvery mesh showed through tigerstriped fur in places; a cyborg spy. She looked away in revulsion, afraid that she knew exactly what she must do next.

The medical centre ...
she thought. The essential location. They needed that Gatecoder unit. The gatecoder kernel was surprisingly small, a customized Von Neumann machine that carried a parasite module. The parasite, when full grown, was a placentory: a factory for building human bodies at an accelerated rate. Already she felt the chill wind of fear breathing down her neck.
If the tapeworm's got to it
... she hunkered down in her supports as her exoskeleton lumbered along the road. The tapeworm Lorma had said, was from the dark anthropic zone: the sector of the graph of possible universes where human-like life could not arise. Not just a Lamarckian organism that coded into genes the characteristics it required to deal with its environment, but something worse: a machine designed to out-evolve and out-eat everything in the colony by integrating them into itself. There was a name for a huge cell with several nuclei, Oshi recalled: a syncitium. The worm was a Lamarckian, heterogenous syncitium. It could eat
anything
. Including the gatecoder and its placentory module, which they would need for the hijacking. Maybe the worm wouldn't have got there yet. Maybe it would be alright ...

Eventually Oshi arrived at the edge of the necropolis. She stared at the darkened shell of the nearest habitat. The door gaped on blackness. Something crackled faintly in her earphones; a mindless crepitation from the dying forest behind the twilit structure.

Stripped of the burden of life, she imagined the winds of time scouring the colony clean. She could see it as it would appear in a thousand years: a bizarre fossil lined with the ossified corpses of trees, baked by the heat of a distant sun. Distant protruberances would fall away over the years, dropping off the axial docking modules: the colony would roll and tumble unwatched through the centuries, at the heart of a belt of debris around Turing. The air would eventually leak away, but for a long time before then there would be a deathly silence broken by the pings and groans of metal warming and cooling. There were no barbarians in this star system, no witnesses to stare and marvel at the dusty artefacts. The diseased eye would darken, collapse, the contents sucked out of it by the vacuum of time: in the end, nothing would remain but a husk, a vacant socket that had once borne light and life, falling in orbit around the skull of a dead planet.

Where has everyone gone
? she wondered, almost desperate to see a human face.
This can't be the end yet. It's too early!

Stepping forward, she saw a pathetic bundle lying beside the path. Booster muscles whined in her knee joint as she rolled the corpse over with a boot, far enough to see an unfamiliar face before it fell back. She shuddered, cranked up the oxygen flow through her mask. The wisdom net was silent as the grave. She moved onwards.

The door to the medicentre was open. She stood on the threshold for a minute, breathing deeply and trying to think. A faint hissing came from inside, like escaping gas. The sniffer on the outside of her exoskeleton locked in, feeding olfactory insights to her.
Something in there stinks
, she decided.
But what?
It was an indeterminate worry; unrealistic. She felt like a tourist visiting a souvenir shop in a death camp, decades later, witnessing disconnected horrors with no toe-hold in reality. This couldn't be happening. She stepped inside. There was a manual light control just inside the doorway, a concession to primitive instincts. She slapped it lightly and looked around as the ceiling brightened.

Lying before her was the source of the smell; sickly sweet and withered, with empty eye sockets that buzzed. Rotting placentories hung like strange fruit on either side, each containing a fragile harvest of slime-smeared human bones. She recoiled, taking in everything with obsessive intensity.
What --
she thought, then looked up. At the artefact in the centre of the room.

"Hello Oshi," said the thing in the life-support bush. "Small world, isn't it?"

Six days had turned Raisa into a shell; a rotting chrysalis within which nothing but a core of personality remained. She'd taken a cumulative dose of decaGreys: what was left of her body was held together by the frond-like peripherals of the life support system. Her skin was blotched and bruised and peeling, her hair moulting; she looked like a week-dead corpse.

"You took your time getting here," she said drily.

Oshi blanched. "I thought you were uploaded." For a moment her shell cracked; she looked at Raisa with eyes like broken glass.

"Sort-of: I had to stay," Raisa said. Her throat crackled with mucus as the speech-synth vocalised for her, her injured pharynx vainly trying to keep up with her brain. "Rest evacuated ... we all uploaded. But I wanted to talk to you."

Oshi glanced down. A mess of decaying skin and bones -- all that was left of a goon -- lay before Raisa's support hammock.

"A little contretemps," Raisa said tiredly. "Not everyone made it. The goon squad went crazy. You know about them?"

Oshi looked at her dully. Slowly her face relaxed. One cheek twitched into a self-deprecating grin. "So you decided to stay for a little chat, right? If the radiation level here is so intense, what's going to happen on Pascal?" She turned away as if embarrassed, trying to conceal her reaction. Shoulders shaking. She really
had
thought that maybe --

"I wanted to talk to you."

Oshi turned round slowly. "About what?"

"I think you know."

"You didn't have to stay." The air between them was gravid with tension.

"Ah, but I wanted to. I really -- you didn't give me enough time."

The gatecoder module bulked large against one wall, a black slab of warm ceramic. Oshi slumped against it. "I didn't know what I was asking for," she said. "Why now?"

"Life's been empty. Too long." Raisa shook her head, support hammock fronds manipulating muscles that were already decaying, eaten from within by their own lysosomes. "Do I need to give you a reason? Oh, Oshi, I didn't realise it would be like this."

"I had thought that maybe," Oshi said brokenly. "You and I --"

There was a carrier-wave whistle from the speech-synth. "Plans!" Raisa said with gentle derision. "I could see you making plans for us. Do you realise what's happened? I'm here. I'm still alive. I'll recover, you'll see. Just take a bit of cellular reconstruction. I didn't want to be alone ... what do you expect?"

Oshi shook her head, limp-necked. "Not this. I've got to get the gatecoder up to the hub, grow a new placentory. Without it we can't go anywhere. But Rai, there's hope! Boris, the others -- everyone -- they've uploaded. Anubis is dead and we're going to steal the Ultrabright ship! I can take you up to the hub. There's room for both of us. Do you want that?"

Raisa lay amidst the quiet hissing of pumps, silent for seconds as she formulated an answer.

"Maybe," she said. "But I don't think I can move yet. I'm fixed, here. The tapeworm tried to get to the gatecoder but I stopped it. I stopped it good ... fed it
fugu
. I hurt, Oshi, I hurt everywhere. I can't move. What are you going to do?"

Oshi shrugged angrily. "What can I do? I wanted ..." she caught herself. Raisa closed her sunken eyes.

"I'll tell you what I was going to do," Oshi said. She licked her lips.
Story time
. It was a distraction from her real worries: she didn't have to think about Raisa's condition if she kept talking. "There's a starship out there. With a small expansion processor, a gatecoder receiver, and a drive of some kind. It's dumb right now, waiting for an Ultrabright to arrive by broadcast transmission and tell it what to do. We're going to assemble a fleet of small ships. The enemy's parked in orbit thirty light seconds away. We don't have portable expansion processors capable of running an attack, but brains are cheap ... we need to grow bodies, soldiers to control the attack drones when we get close in. Then when we've hacked into the berserker we'll take control, set course for the nearest inhabited system. That's the plan."

Raisa's eyelids snapped open, revealing bloodshot conjunctivae; "take me with you?"

"Oshi's face softened. "You're in danger here. We've got to get you to the hub somehow --"

"Can't move. I'm still too ill. I'd be dead but for the nanosystems glueing my cells together."

"But you're --"

"A medic, or what passes for one here. I know best. Oshi? I'll have to wait. Take my chances with the tapeworm. It's very subtle, you know. Assimilates predator tactics, memes, as well as genes from its victims. But it doesn't know
everything
." An expression of loathing or disgust twisted her face and she shut her eyes. "Oshi?"

"Yes?" Oshi took a step closer, until she could feel Raisa's breath on her cheek.

"Kiss me --" She tilted her face up towards Oshi, pursed slack bruised lips. Oshi instinctively leaned close, smelt something through her oloreceptors, jerked back and looked ...

Raisa's mouth hung open. There were no teeth inside: she no longer had a tongue. Her mouth was full of pale wormy palps, questing heads blindly seeking the warmth of human breath: "Oshi? Kiss me?"

Oshi looked at the support hammock, then at the ground beneath it. The floor was humped up, cracked open, something vegetable thrusting through and up into the mass of life support equipment that cradled Raisa. It smelt of shit and decaying vegetables and worms. The thing at the centre of the mass twitched, pulsing in time to the motion of Raisa's rib cage like the arm below a glove puppet.

"Upload," said Oshi: "shit!" She scrambled back, covering her face with one hand, trying not to vomit. "If that's still you, Raisa, evacuate; go Dreamtime at once!"

"What's wrong? Oshi, I feel strange --" Raisa opened her eyes and screamed.

Her body heaved itself upright, shedding wires and support tubes like dandruff. A fat white cable impaled her from below: her eyes bulged and when she opened her mouth something like spaghetti spewed writhing and twitching across her chin. Tears of blood trickled down her cheeks as wormy pseudopods erupted from her eyes and ears. She glided forward, thrusting atop a thick body that slithered snake-like across the floor.

Oshi reacted instantly. She threw up her ghost arms: a mess of tracking digits splashed across the room, the tapeworm, the gutted puppet impaled upon it. She made one spastic twitch and there was a noise like a giant zip fastening lined with firecrackers. Shrapnel sang and pinged across the room. The world outside the medicentre screamed: the floor shook as the various extrusions of the tapeworm registered the pain of this extension.