Scratch Monkey (33 page)

Oshi lashed out with another arm, grabbing the smooth exterior of the Gatecoder module. It was buttoned down, totally sealed -- someone had packed it up in anticipation of trouble. "
Thank you Raisa
," she mumbled, tears rising and her stomach heaving in noxious sympathy as she dragged at the heavy pod. Motors whined in her climb-spider as she hauled it up onto her back and glanced round for signs of the tapeworm's return.
Raisa
, she mourned.
Why did you stay behind?
Was it out of a sense of misplaced duty? Or was it that she knew what would happen if she didn't shut down the gatecoder and they needed it?
The tapeworm acquires predator tactics from elsewhere, adding them to its repertoire as it blindly seeks to convert all biomass in the colony into extensions of itself.
You don't stay behind after you've uploaded. There's not much left behind in your skull, anyway. Raisa was safe. But whatever had taken control of her body had known how to use it ...

Oshi stumbled out into the diseased night, crying and panting and trying not to think about anything, hauling the hope of survival on her back.

The axial factories clustered around the hub of the colony, exposed to the vacuum of space outside the pressurized habitat cylinder. Connected by hollow tubes, they resembled a huge string of garlic hanging from one end of an oil drum. Beyond them hung the docking bay: a vast bucket, open to space at one end. A school of tiny minnows clustered in the bottom of the bucket, locked onto the unpressurized end wall of the colony.

Each minnow massed six thousand tons, empty: triple that when loaded with reaction mass and payload. They were fusion rockets, complex assemblies of drive shields, fuel tanks, payload platforms. Each ship was large enough to carry heavy mining equipment, factories, aeromining assemblies, attack drones. There were eighty of them; all that was left of Anubis's neglected planetary engineering fleet. They had been mothballed decades ago, when the Superbright turned away from his mission to follow other, less material, goals. The ships slumbered for years, their systems powered down, drawing parasite power from the colony's grid. But now circumstances had changed, and the ships were beginning to awaken.

Oshi was depressed. Every time she looked out at the empty eye socket of the colony she saw a mirror to her dreams. The dim light filtering from the axial tube sprayed randomly across a mute landscape with no sentience to illuminate it. Quirks of the ecostructure had rendered it vulnerable to takeover by the right category of parasite: the tapeworm had spread out, infiltrating every available niche, and the cylinder was slowly filling with a haze of deathly-thick fog. The structure was degenerating, slowly turning into an undifferentiated and simple predator as it eliminated all it's macroscopic rivals. That was what it had been created for, after all: a biological weapon that had spun out of control. A deadly gossamer cloud of fibres threaded the decomposing crust of buildings and soil in the colony, leaking a pale yellow fluid across the sterilized ground.

But some parts of the colony were still hazardous. As soon as she'd reached the airlock Oshi had triggered the decontamination cycle, searing everything outside her isolation suit with short-wavelength ultraviolet: when she was sure the lock was sterile, she'd thermite-welded the lock door shut.
The tapeworm assimilates the tactics of its victims.
What it had done with the Raisa-puppet haunted her dreams, shaking her awake in a cold choking panic. First vocalization, then intelligence ... where would it stop? She used the axial control nexus to trace all the other airlocks opening onto the interior of the colony: then welded them shut and shorted out the control circuits. She set up monitor programs, watching every corner of the axial redoubt and the hub factories. Her dreams were haunted by decaying bodies in gashed space-suits, writhing with white coiled life. If the worm learned how to space walk before she was ready to launch ...

I'll have to destroy the colony
, she realised, grimly watching its progress through external video eyes.
To sterilise this infection will take more than antibiotics.
Whatever was left of Raisa had tried tetrodotoxin, just about the most lethal neurotoxin known: it hadn't worked. And the worm was learning, using lures. It talked to her over the comm if she let it, stringing together nonsensical invitations and threats, fronting faces from which the grey flesh dripped in slow-melting ropes. She blinked slowly.
It could be worse. Lorma could have used nanoassemblers. Grey goop syndrome ...
runaway nanorobots would have converted the entire colony into a bloom of furiously replicating molecular monsters by now. But the tapeworm was less efficient, and less predictable. It might still have a nasty surprise in store for her, and this was a risk she was not prepared to expose herself to.

The axial territories outside the biosphere were safe for Oshi as long as she observed biohazard precautions. One morning she visited a pressurised module she'd set up in one of the huge freight elevators that connected the factory sections to the docking station. She travelled by spider, externally sterilised, airlocks copulating and pulsing with plastic flexibility in the variable pressure zones. She let it suck her through a succession of claustrophobic chambers, the airflow whispering sweet nothings to her. She remembered -- couldn't forget -- Raisa:
if it has truly become intelligent
-- what of the real woman?

Days before, she'd cloned the gatecoder firmware and despatched the specification to the factories for duplication. Eighty payload pallets were under construction, sized for the docking adapters of the ghost fleet. She'd worked it out with Boris and Mik, a ghostly telconference that had lasted nearly a day in realtime as they politely, almost ritualistically, waited for the thirty-second lag in communication. Each gatecoder would handle a dozen clone-and-download cases simultaneously, which should be enough. There was a limit, after all, to the number of attack drones the factories could build with the available materials. With all the uploads in the Pascal dreamtime, they had more than enough pilots for the combat craft ...

A squishing of soft gaskets and a clicking of latches bought her back to full awareness. Yawning, her ears popping from the pressure differential, Oshi pulled herself hand-over-hand into the cramped, dim-lit space of the factory. It was building a duplicate gatecoder, unpacked and expanded for operational status. Placentory airlocks covered the walls of the control room, lending it an appearance like the inside of an insect's compound eye. Behind them the automated nanofactories worked in a haze of straw-coloured fluid, reconstructing humanity. She felt oppressed by the implication of their existence;
being here is like being a spectator during a birth
, she thought. It was an alien feeling, a reminder that humans were -- when it came down to definitions -- merely a more compact kind of replicant factory. Breeders.

Sweating uncomfortably, she hung head-down above the placentory windows. Wisdom dumped a mass of raw life support data across her field of vision; she stared in fascination at the graphics, indicators of life being bootstrapped. Briefly she harboured a conceit that she was actually a machine, at home among the uterine technologies of the medicentre.

Childbearing was something Oshi had never expected to undergo. When she had been a child she had expected to die, insofar as she had expected anything: and later, her Superbright owners had deliberately supressed any maternal inclinations she might have succumbed to. They had stripped her down and tuned her up like a machine, to become the mother of battle, not the mother of soldiers. Now she was to be both, but only by proxy. She sighed and looked at her dim reflection in the wall screen. There were bags under her eyes; this was the second day running that she'd had bloody diarrhoea. She wasn't going to die, but she felt like it. She felt ancient -- a very soft machine.

"Talk to me," she said. "Online systems?"

"
You called?
" answered the machine.The voice came from the wall behind her. Her neck twinged in irritation; she resisted the urge to turn her head.

"Is this a sentient sub-system?"

"
Class structure undefined
," replied the voice.
Good,
she thought. So the medical monitor system was dumb.

"List neobirths in progress," she requested. The lights dimmed and the wall in front of her lit up in cool red relief. There were nine tanks; in four of them floated a perfectly formed adult skeleton at the centre of a haze of blood-tinged connective tissues.

"Components present are derived from download specifications comprising alpha twelve program. Calceous support-structures already formed for initial batch of four. Cellular assembly progressing nominally on basal infrastructure. Individual subjects are referenced to your contacts database as Boris, Raisa, Mikhail, Lorma, Mai Winh ..." the control system continued, listing about twenty names; Boris had been very explicit in his requests. This was to be the strategic command crew, travelling together on one ship. It looked about right, Oshi noted; all the bones were adult-sized. High-speed downloading required a radically new way of growing tissues; the gatecoder fiddled with tissue differentiation mechanisms to build a new body as fast as possible. The skeleton came first, plugged into support systems, then a cardiovascular network capable of supporting the rapid growth of new organs. Twenty years of growth could be compressed into a matter of weeks.

"Speed it up," Oshi ordered. "I want them hatched as soon as possible. Don't accept any instructions from anyone but myself, delivered in person in this room, until the current downloads are reborn. Then prepare a download schedule for all uploads nominated by Mikhail, to follow at the optimum interval relative to one another. Distribution between gatecoder modules according to optimum load balance and tactical bias. Send it to me via wisdom when it's ready. Further directives will follow." She finished at a gabble, sweat standing out on her brow.
We're committed now. Five hundred soldiers coming down the chute, and nowhere to go but out
.

She straightened up, and left the room as fast as possible. Which was why she wasn't there when the control system spoke quietly to the empty air: "Alert. There is an error condition associated with subject Raisa Marikova. Codon error: illegal nanostructure is associated with subject's homoeobox structure. Phenotype error: subject homoeobox specification contains abnormal neurological structure. Do you want me to proceed ..?"

There was no reply.

The Gatecoder waited for a long time, repeating the message occasionally. Finally, when it received no further instructions and could wait no longer, it resolved the problem by checking its default decision set. Then it began to put together the first body.

The chosen vehicle was an in-system shuttle. It was a stubby cylinder, propelled by a pulsed fusion reaction; fast, simple, brutally non-virtual. Oshi suited up to inspect it from outside, floating in the vacuum of the main docking area. She hung before it, suspended on monofilament cables from the docking hub and the side wall like a spider webbing the bell of an enormous flower.

The
Bronstein
was a true space ship; not some hyped-up atmospheric shockwave rider, but a freighter capable of going anywhere in the system. It could operate with or without a human crew, having been designed for maintaining the cloud of drone platforms dispersed throughout the Ridgegap system. Decades ago, those platforms had pumped a steady stream of raw materials down into the gravity well of Turing. Some had been assembled into this colony. Others had been diverted in-system to the venusiform world Wirth, their impact showering the clouds of that planet with tailored algae. Days ago Oshi had given the order to have the
Bronstein
and its sister ships powered up and readied for flight. Where to go was an interesting question; the Ultrabright attack craft was driftings towards a parking orbit around Turing, its monster engine powered down. But if it changed its mind and began to move once they'd launched on a rendezvous course, things could get very unpleasant indeed.

Sensors on the inside of her helmet visor monitored her breathing mix: a concealed fan churned quietly, forcing dry air past her sweating face. Too many things could go wrong in deep space. Planetary life was inherently fail-safe: big, comforting biospheres could recover from those little course-corrections that triggered mass extinctions. But this fleet of attacking minnows was inherently vulnerable. All the target had to do was move out of their reach and ...

Stop worrying
, she berated herself.
It's a dumb attack drone, just a million times bigger than anything we'd build. If it doesn't see us it's not going to come looking. We're fleas, we can sneak up on it.
Or die trying. She had a sudden, ghastly vision: eighty ships launched into the void with insufficient reaction mass to return and nothing much to go back to anyway. The enemy ship, listening to the orders of a silent voice, fired up its black-hole powered drive, squashed atoms into fragments of exotic energy, accelerated outwards. The eighty ships drifted endlessly out into the Kuiper belt on a long, slow orbit that took their mummified crews ten thousand years out into the starry night before falling back sunwards.

Oshi tugged on her monofilament reels, adjusting her position relative to the wall of the docking bay. The ugly vision receded. She chuckled tiredly to herself and spooled in some cable, dragging herself round the command module of the spaceship.
A spider, dangling from a fullerene fibre web.
The airlock swung into view. She closed in, motors humming in her suit as she zeroed in on it. Presently the lock turned into a trapdoor, swinging up beneath her feet to latch into place with a metallic clank.

There was a puff of vapour as the cramped lock chamber flooded with air; snowflakes glittered briefly in the chill. Oshi waited for pressure equalization, then checked the gas mix before she opened the inner lock door. Uneasily aware of her vulnerability, she commanded her wisdom to log all changes to the life-support environment while she was aboard the ship.
Safety in paranoia
, she thought ironically.
If only there was some other way ...