CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The hike to the next spoke was nerve-racking but uneventful. They found no traps and Kamaitachi did not appear. Instead of a plaza this spoke rose from what had been a grassy park with fountains.
Daslakh—after a great deal of argument—led the way in, creeping along the wall or the ceiling. Atmin followed in his travel sphere. Pera and Sabbath followed, with the engineering laser powered up and ready. Solana, Jaka, and Tanaca were behind Pera, bearing most of the supplies and gear. Anton brought up the rear, wearing the laser backpack and carrying two large water containers which felt heavy enough to pull his arms off. He smiled in secret amusement at the marching order. Without any conscious thought the group had reverted to the pattern of a hunter-gatherer band on the plains of Africa fifty thousand years earlier: expendable men in front and back, women in the middle.
The staircase wound around the elevator shaft, inside the outer diamondoid wall of the spoke. Within the habitat ring, the stairway was more than just an emergency route. It doubled as a scenic overlook, and someone had taken the time to engrave pointers and labels on the inside of the transparent diamondoid, indicating local sites of interest. The labels were little fragments of Safdaghar’s lost past. “Campanile: Full 10-bell peal rung nonstop over 1,004 hours, 9899-324 to 9900-001,” one read. “Two-story green house: Birthplace of Mabikas Tao,” said another. “Black dome: Concert hall, site of the Conclave of 9743-185.” “Floral arch grown for the Sexual Games of 9881.” “Obelisk: Monument to Lavibieno.” “House with cupola: Flashpoint of the Aesthetic Riot, 9882-006.” “Former location of the Bone House, built 9640 and demolished 9883.”
After two circuits of the spoke the labels ended—but then a few meters beyond Anton saw words scratched by hand into the diamond, just at eye level. He read, “the poorest shelter me the weak stand guard fearful and unwilling yet refusing to betray no shield but right, no sword we will not win, we shall not yield” and then the writing stopped.
They climbed, and they climbed, and they climbed some more. Anton tried to breathe regularly. At first he inhaled when he put his left foot on the next step and exhaled when he put his right foot forward. Then he inhaled between steps and exhaled on the power stroke. Finally he was just panting. The muscles in his thighs and calves began to burn, then to scream.
He was determined not to complain, but still felt a rush of relief when Jaka spoke up. “Can we take a rest? Some of us don’t have powered smart suits.”
“Rest break, then,” said Sabbath. “Be sure to drink something.” He eased Pera down to the stairs. The dino went limp, lying as if she had passed out. Her big running-hunter chest was pumping hard and her leg spasmed.
“How high are we?” Jaka asked.
“Fifty-one meters,” said Daslakh. “Halfway to the top of the ring section. At this rate it will only take us two hours to reach the hub. If you want to go even slower, maybe you meat people could take naps or make a nourishing pot of soup from scratch. I’m sure the tireless mech hunting us will wait until you’re done.”
“The gravity will get lighter as we climb,” said Sabbath. “We won’t need as many breaks.”
Except for Atmin, the biologicals were mostly occupied in breathing heavily, but Daslakh seemed to be in the mood for conversation. It crawled over to Sabbath and displayed a question glyph on its back.
“Okay, let’s be candid with each other. I know enough about what happened to Utsuro, and it’s not hard to figure out how Kamaitachi got stuck here. But what about you? Why are you here, Sabbath? The real reason, not your cover story. If you came here to protect us against the mech you’ve done a pretty poor job of it. It’s already bagged two of us and injured Pera, and we haven’t even seen it.”
Sabbath laughed. “Oh, I wasn’t sent here to protect anyone. My job is to tidy up loose ends—in this case, Kamaitachi itself. You don’t really matter to the people I work for. To be honest, my original plan was to just let the mech kill all of you and then dispose of it myself. Simple and tidy.”
Anton moved closer. “Yet you chose to reveal yourself and save Pera.”
“No need to rub it in.” Sabbath was silent for a moment. “If you must know, I did a lot of eavesdropping on your various conversations, even the ones you thought were secret. At one point I overheard your friend Utsuro—my brother Basan—talking about the crime done here in Safdaghar. All the thousands of murders. He wanted to find out what happened, maybe bring the perpetrators to justice.”
“You must have laughed at that,” said Daslakh. “Given that he committed a bunch of them.”
Sabbath looked at the mech sadly and shook his head. “No, it…it helped me realize something. All of us have programming, of one kind or another. Solana’s got a compulsion to serve and obey. Anton had a spy in his head. You’ve got whatever heuristics guide your behavior. I have my own training and indoctrination. But Utsuro didn’t. At least, he didn’t remember it. The physical and psychological trauma stripped all that away.”
He looked up at the ceiling and frowned. “What was left was a better man. Utsuro could tell good from evil, and he wanted to do good. He was better than Basan had been. I can vaguely remember when all my brothers and sisters were like that—before all our training in how to be amoral bastards. For a long time I told myself I didn’t have any choice, but Utsuro showed me I still did. I guess I wanted to live up to his example.”
“Who sent you, then?” asked Anton.
“I’ll never tell,” said Sabbath.
“Seriously?” said Daslakh. “You can’t figure it out? Did Solana take out your frontal lobes by mistake? Who wanted Pasquin Tiu dead? Who has the resources for top-of-the-line gear like what this guy’s got? He’s got to be working for Deimos, and I can’t believe he doesn’t know it.”
Sabbath made no reply.
“Deimos? Why would they kill a whole habitat just to get one person? It doesn’t make sense,” said Solana.
“You’re thinking like a normal human,” said Daslakh. “To one of the oldest and most powerful polities in the Billion Worlds it makes perfect sense. Everybody knows the Deimos Community are a bunch of ruthless bastards. That’s not a bad reputation to have, actually. People don’t cross you. I expect the original plan was to be ultra-subtle and sneaky. Pasquin Tiu just turns up dead with no explanation and everybody’s suitably impressed. But something went wrong and the operation got blown. The team had to fight their way out, and didn’t care how much carnage they left behind.”
“And then Utsuro got injured,” said Anton.
“Basan,” said Sabbath. “He was still Basan then. Utsuro came later. He got hurt and left the station, signaling for a pickup that never came. That’s the other side of being ruthless bastards: abandoning your tools if they fail.”
“Kamaitachi stayed behind to finish the job,” said Daslakh.
“But why? What purpose could it serve? Did the mech go crazy?” asked Solana.
“Again: you need to think like Deimos,” said Daslakh. “It’s okay if everyone in the Billion Worlds knows you’re implacable and ruthless. It’s even okay if they think you’re a bunch of bloodthirsty monsters who deal out wildly disproportionate retribution for real or imagined slights. Those are all useful for the Deimos Community. They’ve been cultivating that reputation since before the Fourth Millennium.”
“Old habits die hard,” said Sabbath.
“What Deimos can’t afford is for others to see them as incompetent or weak. That’s just asking for trouble, even from allies. So once Utsuro—or Basan, or whatever you want to call him—was mission-killed, Kamaitachi had to eliminate the witnesses. All of them. It’s fine if people suspect Safdaghar died because they pissed off Deimos. It’s absolutely intolerable for people to know Safdaghar chased off a pair of Deimos operatives and hurt one of them badly.”
“And I’m afraid Kamaitachi probably enjoyed doing it anyway,” said Sabbath. “Having employees who love their work is normally a good thing, but when the job involves murdering people, well…”
“Bad PR. So they send you out to kill it—and us. By the way, I hope you’ve noticed a fundamental flaw to the whole murder-the-witnesses approach: it’s hard to know when to stop. How do you know there won’t be somebody waiting back home to break you down to basic elements to keep you from talking?” Daslakh accompanied this with a little stick-figure animation on its shell, showing little cartoon characters shooting, stabbing, and poisoning each other.
Solana interrupted. “You keep saying Deimos did this and Deimos did that, like it’s a single person. There’s a trillion people living in the Deimos Ring, and they have volunteer committees running everything. How could anyone even suggest doing that? How could it get approved?”
Sabbath just sighed. “You need to learn more history. My little section has been around as long as anyone can tell—since back when Deimos was just a rock with an elevator down to Mars. The bureau changes names whenever a new system takes over, and sometimes it gets disbanded, but it always comes back. There’s probably more than one, operating unknown to each other. Deimos needs us. The ring around Mars is just a tiny part of Deimos. Most of its wealth is spread across the system, in millions of different financial networks and interlocking economies. You can’t protect an empire like that with lasers and RKVs. You have to do it by eliminating problems, as cheaply as possible.”
“Murdering people,” said Anton.
Sabbath looked so surprised and hurt it might have been genuine. “Only as a very last resort. Killing’s wasteful. Our primary weapon is bribery. Make it attractive to do what Deimos wants. One excellent bribe is simply to offer them the chance to join the Deimos Community. Turn enemies into assets. We tried that with Pasquin Tiu, repeatedly. Stubborn fellow. Wouldn’t take our grants, wouldn’t accept a cushy fellowship, wouldn’t even be part of the Deimos counterculture.”
“Almost like he noticed your edgy rebels are still part of your cultural empire,” said Daslakh.
“When people can only oppose Deimos’s economic and political power via memes crafted in Deimos, we’ve already won.”
“How do you get any of this past the volunteer committees without someone revealing all your secrets?” asked Anton.
Sabbath laughed. “The committee system is a perfect environment, really. Who do you think volunteers to be on the Special Activities Committee? Spies, ex-spies, and wannabes. All the important stuff gets done via private networks, anyway. If there’s any real opposition, well, the same techniques work inside Deimos as outside. Bribe, co-opt, blackmail, erase memories, fatal accident. We’ve got funding sources the other committees don’t know about, so we’re pretty much free to act as we see fit.” He stood and stretched. “Come on, everybody. Time to keep moving. Stretch out and line up.”
Anton tried to distract himself as they climbed. They were at about ninety-five percent gravity, but the brief rest had left everyone still sore and tired. Another fifty meters would take them to the top of the ring section. Beyond that was a four-hundred-meter stretch of spoke extending through space to the solar array access ring, halfway to the hub. Another four hundred beyond that, past the heat radiators, would bring them to the manufacturing and low-gravity living areas.
He wasn’t sure which would be the most dangerous part of the climb. In the long spoke stretches they would be trapped in a tube, with no way to escape if the mech attacked. But in the warren of the hub they would have to worry about it coming from any direction.
The simple truth was that they were in danger everywhere inside Safdaghar. And in danger during the aerobraking pass through Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Even in the synchronous ring orbiting Jupiter Solana would be among a trillion humans, with only her goggles to protect her.
Was there anywhere at all she could be safe?
Anton smiled at himself then. Why was he worrying about keeping Solana safe? Surely that would be her responsibility. As soon as the shuttle reached the synchronous ring they would part forever, both free—and alone.
His thigh muscles and calves were screaming again long before they reached the top of the ring. Ahead he could see Sabbath plodding grimly along. He didn’t seem to care. His suit—now in the form of a Deimos Special Forces formal dress uniform without insignia—could easily manage the load.
“Need…to stop,” Pera gasped out as they approached the hundred-meter mark.
“Just a few more steps to the landing,” said Sabbath. “You can make it.”
“Trap!” shouted Daslakh, and everyone froze. Jaka dropped to one knee and dragged Tanaca down with her.
“Where?” Pera demanded, still a bit shaky.
“Right up ahead, ten steps up from the one under me.”
Pera and Sabbath moved up to where Daslakh clung to the inner wall of the staircase. Atmin bobbed in the air next to the mech. “No peril to me does appear. What is it that you see?” he asked.
“That step’s irregular. All the others are nineteen centimeters, tread to tread. But that one sticks up by about four millimeters.”
“An error in construction, could it be?”
“Can’t risk it,” said Pera. “Daslakh, can you tell anything about its internal structure? Ultrasound or something?”
“It’s solid,” said Daslakh after a second. “Density’s about point nine. There might be embedded circuitry.”
“Do you think it is a bomb? Or some more deadly thing?” asked Atmin.
“Could be anything,” said Pera. “Explosive, acid polymer, expanding foam…whatever it is, assume it’s proximity-triggered. I think I can cut it out. Bunch up behind me, everyone. If it falls and explodes, the blast will be one turn behind us.”
Everyone except Sabbath huddled together in the small clump of steps which were on the opposite side of the spoke from the suspicious one. For once Jaka looked serious, even worried. There was no way for her to bully a bomb, no words to manipulate it.
Pera sighted with her engineering laser and made a quick cut across the riser, about two centimeters below the top of the irregular step. She cut across the riser above it, so that the tread was supported only on the sides.
“Now the fun part. This might set it off.” She hesitated, then made a quick cut down the left side. Anton could hear everyone around him holding their breath, and then all exhaled together after nothing happened.
She made a second cut on the right side, and the tread tipped, then fell through to the stairs below.
“Nothing happened,” said Jaka. “Just a big waste of time.”
“It’s squawking,” said Daslakh. “A short repeating code burst.”
“Kamaitachi knows where we are,” said Sabbath. “Time to move.”
They all stepped cautiously over the gap left by the cutting. Ahead of Anton Solana couldn’t help but look down. “It’s getting—” she began, and then the fallen stair below them burst into flames. Fire jetted out from it in all directions, and hot smoke streamed through the gap in the stairs. More smoke billowed up the staircase behind them.
“No retreat,” said Pera.
A dozen steps beyond the trap the spoke passed through a floor atop the habitat ring. The main purpose of the level was access to lights and environmental systems, but around the spoke the roof was transparent and the space was set up for recreation, with a couple of bars, a dining area, and a big open floor for dancing or sports. The tables and couches had all battered themselves to bits during Safdaghar’s years of unstable spin, but Anton didn’t notice. His gaze went upward to where Jupiter and all its satellites shone through the diamondoid roof, looping endlessly as the hab rotated.
They were close. At just under a hundred standard hours until Safdaghar’s closest approach, Jupiter itself was a bright ball half as wide as Anton’s outstretched hand, surrounded by the solid band of the synchronous ring, half again as big as the planet itself. He could see all four Galilean moons, and Callisto was near enough to show a visible disk of blue ocean and white cloud-swirls.
The backdrop for the planet and its remaining moons was a haze of orange pinpoints: the hundred million habs of the Jovian Great Ring, home to nearly two hundred trillion baseline beings. The Great Ring filled a fat torus around Jupiter, from about ten million to twenty million kilometers out. Seventy moons and hundreds of asteroids had been dismantled for the raw materials—supplemented by matter lifted from Jupiter itself—to build the structures of the Great Ring, ranging from village-sized microhabs to a few dozen planet-sized titans housing tens of billions each.
When Yanai had adjusted Safdaghar’s orbit to pass through this cloud of worlds, she had made sure the doomed hab would not pass within a kilometer of any of the permanent structures circling Jupiter. But there was no way she could account for the billions of spacecraft—both intelligent ships and dumb ballistic payloads—constantly churning through the sky. Avoiding collision was up to them, and to the six mighty Ophanim who managed traffic control in Jovian space. The six of them had ultimate authority over spacecraft, and were famously remorseless about using their terawatt lasers to deflect or vaporize objects in danger of collision. Unpowered objects like Safdaghar had the right of way, but if it came to making choices about saving lives, a wreck with seven people aboard might easily be sacrificed to protect others.
“We’ve got to rest,” said Anton, and nobody argued. They sat in the middle of the big dance floor, facing outward. So far all of Kamaitachi’s attacks had been close up, cutting and smashing. No projectiles. That was a small mercy.
Sabbath checked the bar and came back with sealed cans of mors. “I’ll be the taster.” He peeled back the lid of one and sipped through the membrane, then made a face. “I forgot how much I don’t like this stuff. It’s fine, drink up.”
Sitting with his back against Pera’s torso, wedged between Tanaca and Solana, Anton felt himself getting drowsy. The adrenaline surge he’d been riding since Solana had cut into his skull was over, and his body was going on strike in protest. He didn’t fight it. A quick nap was just the thing he needed before the next climb. His thoughts drifted and soon became dreams.
A sharp jab in his left calf brought him wide awake, to see Daslakh standing in front of him with words displayed on its shell: SOMETHING MOVING UNDER THE FLOOR. BE READY TO SCATTER.
It moved to show the message to Solana. The others were already moving slowly, irregularly, getting into position.
“Go!” said Daslakh via comm, and the eight of them scrambled and sprinted away from the center of the floor, just before half a dozen jagged meter-long blades punched through the polished surface.
Pera aimed her engineering laser at a spot in the center of the ring of blades, carving a hole in the floor and then firing into the opening. Anton didn’t need Daslakh’s hyper-acute senses or Solana’s goggles to feel the enemy under the floor now. He could see the floor ripple as it surged toward Pera—only to stop when the dino drew a laser line in its path.
“Wait, stop!” Sabbath called out. “Kamaitachi! We want to talk to you.”
“Is he insane?” said Jaka. “It’s a killer!”
“I thought you didn’t believe in killer mechs,” said Anton.
The movement under the floor stopped for a moment, then with a great popping and splintering noise of cracking graphene, a pair of ropy arms pried up two of the floor panels, revealing a dark space below.
A second later Kamaitachi climbed up into the light, and Anton stared in fascination. The mech was smaller than he had expected, maybe half the mass of a human, no more than a meter tall.
Something had hurt it very badly, overwhelming its ability to repair itself. Its central body was blackened and fused, like sand turned to glass by intense heat. The damaged section was rigid, unable to change shape or even bend. Its surface was stuck in a chaotic swirl of mirror-shiny and utter black. The hard bits looked painful, like thick scabs on a human face. Limbs sprouted from one side of the damaged area, changing shape and length as the mech walked. Its movements looked drunken, almost random, but no less menacing for that. Like a wounded tiger. Anton didn’t need Solana’s goggles to see the air around the mech shimmering with heat. It was throwing off hundreds of kilowatts and probably had reserve capacity to draw on.
He was terrified, of course. Even damaged, Kamaitachi was still utterly deadly, and looked it. But he also felt a little surge of pride—pride for the people of Safdaghar. With their garden tools and improvised weapons they had almost managed to destroy this deadly mech. For eighty centuries every battle between living things and machines had gone to the machines. Even the Great War of the Fourth Millennium had been primarily machines against machines. But the people of Safdaghar had managed a draw. It felt like a victory.
“Kamaitachi!” said Sabbath. “Your mission is done. Time to stand down and leave this place.”
After a second it replied. The voice was deep, mellow, almost musical, but the words were madness. “Never done nikty wan never leave keep segredo kill todos hurt todos punish todos punish punish kata kiru picar nero threads devour bloody ice secret forever.”
“Listen to me. Un assemblage de fous, de méchants, et de malheureux,” said Sabbath. “I speak for Deimos.”
“A command phrase? You’ve got that poor bastard under external control?” said Daslakh, turning hazard orange.
“We’ve all got them. Goes with the job,” said Sabbath. “Kamaitachi: go into hibernation mode now.”
But instead of shutting itself down, the mech lashed out with an arm, which stretched three meters as it swung at Sabbath, its tip sprouting curved blades as big as Solana’s forearm. “Can not, will not, are not, would not, is not, do not, am not, did not, could not, shall not, was not. Orokamono, jaakuna-sha, mijimena mono no korekushon!”
Daslakh had been standing still, stuck to the floor just out of Kamaitachi’s reach. Now it jumped back, bouncing off the ceiling and sticking to the wall just next to the door. Its shell was bright orange again. “Comms off now!” it said. “That lunatic’s full of attack code. The bad kind.”
Sabbath’s suit reacted to the striking mech faster than any human could, pivoting to take the blow on its right shoulder, the material turning hard and sprouting needles to catch the blades. Sabbath and the suit did a shoulder roll in the other direction as the blades hit, moving with the impact, while the needles bent and wrapped around the blades.
But Kamaitachi was braced, its other limbs stuck to the floor. A few seconds of desperate thrashing about followed as Sabbath’s suit first tried to sever the killer mech’s long ropy arm, then struggled to resist being pulled toward the flowering fractal blades of its other limbs. The suit finally got its feet onto the floor and stuck, letting the mech pull it upright. The two tugged and strained, and the air around them rippled with the heat they were throwing off. It was a contest that Sabbath’s suit couldn’t win without cooking him inside itself.
Sabbath slashed through the ropy arm gripping him and fell back as it parted. The bit stuck to him flowed out of his hands and leaped back to join the rest of Kamaitachi. “Tanaca! The breacher!” Sabbath shouted.
Tanaca moved with her usual sleepwalker’s pace, raising the plasma breacher and staring as if she had never seen it before. Anton snatched it from her. Long ago he had done militia training, along with every other adult of Fratecea, preparing for the invasion of counterrevolutionaries which never came. He remembered the drill: flip up the panel on top of the breacher, look for the green light indicating full charge, click the mechanical safety from green to red, activate magnetic containment, place the muzzle between one and four meters from the surface to be breached, brace for recoil and—
He pressed the firing button and closed his eyes in the same instant. His training instructor would have hit him for it, but the flash lit up the blood vessels in his eyelids and Anton knew he would be blind for minutes if he hadn’t shut his eyes.
When he opened them he saw a meter-wide hole in the wall, the edges still aflame. A couple of meters beyond that, a second wall showed a smaller hole, and three meters beyond that a black starburst on an unbreached wall. There was no sign of Kamaitachi.
“Did I get it?” he asked.
“Grazed it,” said Daslakh, poking at a twisted bit of blackened smart matter on the floor.
“You idiot!” Jaka shouted at Anton. “That was our one chance and you wasted it!”
“No time for bickering,” said Sabbath. “We need to get moving, as quick as we can.”
They formed up into the same order as before without any discussion. The only difference was that Tanaca lagged behind Jaka and Solana, so that Anton had to keep urging her forward. He had never seen her look so blank. Compared to her normal vague expressionlessness, her face now looked like a corpse.
“It’s all right,” he said to her, not knowing what else to say. “We’ll make it. You’ll be fine.”
“Why won’t it stop?” she muttered, and then was silent again.
Beyond the roof of the lounge area, the spoke’s walls were solid graphene, with layers of radiation and micrometeorite shielding on the outside. Anton’s universe contracted to a dozen steps ahead and a dozen steps behind, with curving light-gray walls on either side. A light on the outer wall every six steps, an access panel on the inner wall every dozen.
When they stopped to rest, they just sat down on the stairs. Anton faced down the spiral, and barely rested, watching and listening intently, the manual control for the laser backpack in his hand. With his data implant dead, he had to actually press a button to activate it. Against Kamaitachi that delay might be lethal, so he couldn’t afford to relax.