When Fighting Monsters, page 26
part #5 of The Maauro Chronicles Series
“Wrik,” Maauro’s voice came. “Are you ready?”
“I’m backing in now, engine idling. The door is up for you to dive in.”
“The Beast approaches. It is very angry.”
“Can you tell if Stardust is ok?”
“No, the monster is displaying a new, but not unexpected ability, electromagnetic jamming. Our signal is too close and strong for it to interfere between us.”
“That’s comforting.”
“I will be silent for a bit, I cannot spare even the least processing power. When next you hear my voice, I will be running at maximum speed to you. Firewall it the instant I am in. We have no time to spare.”
“Understood.”
I sat on the quiet deck, the weak sunlight visible just outside the clear plastic curtain that kept the cold at bay. I could see nothing above. That was somehow worse than scanning the skies for our enemy. My mouth was dry, yet sweat ran down my back and I could hear my heart pounding, the blood in my ears.
“Come already, you fucker,” I snarled, forgetting Maauro could hear me. She would know it for what it was, terror trying to turn to anger.
“On my way!” Maauro said in my ears. Her voice was only barely urgent; she could have been late for dinner. I jumped as if stuck with a live wire. Suddenly, I could hear her coming, slamming into things she couldn’t take the time to evade. Then she was in the flitter, which jarred under the impact as she threw herself in.
I stood on the accelerator. We shot forward, slewing a little, as we roared into movement. We tore through the plastic curtain and reached the flat ground beyond. I hit flight mode the first moment I could. The flitter’s nose lifted, its ground-wheels auto-retracting into the body. There was no time to gain altitude. I shoved the throttles past the normal stops into emergency power.
“Where is it?” I yelled unnecessarily. She was just behind me.
“Thirty seconds away, north of us and descending. It thinks us helpless and wishes to grind us to dust. I’m relaying my challenge through the programs I loaded into Hummel. It has not realized that I am not still aboard.”
A warning whine came from the engine as yellow lights appeared across my panel but the base was in view. I aimed for the hanger mouth to the underground tunnel, hating that I had to slow so much.
“Wrik, it is nearing. Hurry! The containment program is failing.”
The light above us faded. Monster or cloud, I had no time to look, but dove into the hanger entrance at a mad speed, then hit the full reverse thruster, not caring if this too burned out in the abused flitter.
The blast went off just as the vast, manta ray shape threw Hummel into shadow and we reached the entrance of the underground hanger. A flash burned on my neck, for an instant, before the canopy polarization kicked in, as the instruments danced madly in the EMP of the collapsing stardrive. I dropped the landing gear and we slid along the century old flooring, glad we’d had the crabs smooth the ground. Still, we hit and slid sideways, as the G-bags deployed, cushioning the rough landing. Despite the crash protection, the jar rattled my teeth.
The flitter slid to a halt.
“Wrik,” Maauro cried, “are you all right?” The EMP hadn’t affected her. She tore through the deflating Gbag and hit the quick release on my chest. “Out, out!”
Dazed, and partially supported by Maauro, I struggled out the flitter door. The ground heaved and bucked like a pain-wracked animal. I glanced up at the cracked ceiling in horror of being buried alive. Maauro dragged me along, her eyes also focused on the failing ceiling, calculating stresses and where it would fall. She batted chunks out of the air, her arm moving almost too fast to see. Her other arm wrapped around me in a sudden brutal movement, everything blurred as she lunged. A massive chunk of ceiling came down behind us.
We reached the arch of the far exit, the strongest, safest place. Above us tornadic winds whipped up black sand and smoke. The wind tore at me, but Maauro was unmoved. She positioned me behind her, then turned.
“Kneel down and press your face against my chest,” she shouted, over the howling and rumbling. “Protect your eyes.”
I burrowed my face against the softness of her chest. Her body arched over me and her arms surrounded me, offering as much protection as she could. The howl of wind and rumbling of ground subsided, as the unstable black hole behind us fizzled out of existence. The artificial fields having compressed it were gone with the ship that had generated them.
Another pressure built in my head, an ocean of surprised suffering. The Beast, devourer that it was, was devoured by the miniature black hole in the millisecond it existed, before Hummel’s AG fields compressing it, blew away. It’s very mass was sucked beyond the event horizon. It knew pain as it had never dreamt of before. It built and built, eliminating sight, sound and sense and suddenly was gone.
I held Maauro in the sudden and illusory silence, knowing that my hearing was temporarily overwhelmed. I could see dimly through the dust sifting down as the winds over us slowed. Debris was still coming down, but we were well in from the entranceway. Still, rocks and chunks of soil struck and bounced. Standing over me, Maauro had reversed her head in a way nothing human could, and studied the fall, ready to bat away anything that threatened to bounce our way.
My hearing began to return, as did light above. With the collapse of the event horizon, it no longer sucked winds with tornadic force. I looked up into Maauro’s concerned face. “I’m ok,” I said, standing.
“Certainly more than our flitter is,” she said, gesturing back toward the partially collapsed section.
“Damn it,” I said. “I just made the last payment on that thing too.”
“There, there, dear,” she said. “We will simply add it to the bill for Candace under “sundries.”
“And to think I once felt I had to drill commerce into your armored skull. The student has now surpassed the master.” I grinned, despite my sudden awareness of a mass of bruises and wrenched muscles, some from where my adorable android had to grab me, without time or leisure for gentleness.
“Let’s get out of the underground,” she said. “The majority of the falling debris is to the north. Radiation is minimal; it was sucked into the singularity. Our anti-rad meds will handle it. I am more worried about this archway.
“Don’t have to ask me twice. We stepped out from under the arch into the swirling dust and walked up the ancient rampway.
From behind us a horrid undulating cry comes from the ruins.
“What!” Wrik says pulling his laser. “It’s dead, I felt it die.
“The scout,” I say.
“What?”
“The Beast had detached a part of itself to look for us. That part must not have caught up to main body of the Beast and avoided being drawn into the black hole,” I say. “I am not in contact with it, but the… pollution it emits is too similar for it to be anything else.”
“Do you have any sense of how big it is, how close?”
“By audio triangulation from bounced sound, I make it two hundred and eleven meters from us. As for the rest, I do not know.”
He swallowed staring into the murk. “What should we do?”
“The ship will be returning with the crabs and other weapons,” I reply. “Until then, we withdraw. Follow me.”
We flee at our best speed. While I could likely have outrun the monster for a short period, I could not do so with Wrik on my back. His delicate human body would not withstand the forces involved. I could leave him, and attack on my own, but the truth is I fear the Beast too much to risk battle before I gather every asset to me, and at the least, remove Wrik from the battlefield. So, we scuttle from cover to cover heading south. We hear no more screams, but I detect a metallic sound similar to a crab robot moving over stone and macadam, as if its pads had been worn through, leaving its metal exposed direct to stone.
We reach the southernmost section of the old ruins. Here, the remains of the old base are lower, more tumbled. We crawl into a pile of rubble by a twisted, rusted and crushed hanger door. I scan the ground ahead, a plain of windswept stone and small scrubby vegetation, not totally devoid of cover, but far too open for my taste. I am uncertain if we are better playing cat and mouse among the ruins, or venturing onto the open field. I still cannot call the ship, an issue more on Stardust’s end than mine. I hesitate.
“Maauro,” I whispered, shifting on the gritty rock while keeping an eye on the remnants of the base in the dim murk. “Mind if I ask you a question?”
“Of course not,” she said. Her voice was low, and she remained fixed on our back trail.
“Why did we go to Olympia?”
“Might this conversation be better had after we escape this enemy?”
“It might. But might that also not be your way of avoiding my question?” I kept my eyes scanning the ruins; for all that I knew she would detect anything before I did. I shivered in the chill, but didn’t adjust the thermostat in my clothes. I didn’t know how much longer we would be out in the cold, and raising my infra-red signature while being hunted was not a good idea.
She sighed. “Very well, I did not want to mention it until I knew if what I asked her about was feasible but—it may be possible for me to live, at least for a time, as a flesh and blood woman.”
I could only stare at her in shock, the words whirling around in my head in the hope they would resolve into something that would make sense. “Maauro, what are you saying?”
“I am saying that I love you and that I have learned of a way in which I might download my consciousness into a human body made for me by Shasti’s geneticists.”
“Why?” I managed
Now it was her turn to look surprised. “Why? So we could be closer of course. I am your lover. While I think that has been wonderful, I feel that there is more that I could know, more that I could feel, if I had a body that was not an armored chassis.”
“But…but you would be mortal,” I stammered. “Think of all you’d be giving up.”
“I prefer to think of all that I might gain, that I might experience love-making as Jaelle, or Olivia, do.”
A distant warning bell went off inside me. Maauro had never shown any significant jealously but that was by human standards. She’d now mentioned Jaelle, the only other serious relationship I had been in, and Olivia, who had briefly been my lover on the Seddon expedition.
“Does it bother you that I have been with other females?”
Maauro seemed to consider my question seriously. “No. It would have been unusual if you had not been. Compared to other males your age you may even be inexperienced.”
Ouch, I thought internally. But it was just Maauro being truthful, if not tactful.
“This is something else,” she continued, apparently having not noticed my wince. “So much of my existence is affectation. I appear to love certain foods, but that is mostly for show. I like sweets for their complexity and for the reaction I get from you when I like them. I profess to enjoy sunny days and cool breezes, but rain, sleet, searing heat are all the same to me. I feel that I miss a vast universe of sensation and experience that exists at my fingertips, but that I cannot touch.
“I am frustrated Wrik; I want to be much more than I am.”
“But…mortality,” I said.
“Haven’t I already existed for over 50,000 years? The first seven I spent as nothing more than a munition. The interregnum was spent fighting entropy alone on an asteroid. Only the years since you found me have had any meaning.
“I fear death, as you term it, but I fear more that I might have to endure centuries without…” she stopped, but I could hear a tremor in her voice and her eyes glimmered from the shadows. Unshed tears?
I hung my head. I knew of these fears of hers, but this was the first time it had hit me so hard. “So many biologicals would trade their bodies to go the other way: to have the freedom from pain and death that you have, the power and ability. How can I see you give up all that for me?”
“My sojourn into a human body need not be permanent. Indeed, I do not plan that it be.” Her voice was steadier, and her green eyes reflected the fading light in a way that no humans could have. “If this works, I would live in a human body and back up my consciousness to my machine body. If the human body fails, I would take up residence again in here.” She patted her torso, it made the same sound as mine would, but only because she so textured it.
“And if you weren’t close to your body?” I demanded.
“There is the risk of some data loss, but only to the last backup,” she said, calmly, as if the data didn’t mean a tiny death, if nothing else.
“I don’t understand. How could you live in both bodies?”
She considered as she returned to scanning the deserted streets. “Darling, we can’t even prove the existence of your soul, much less mine. But I think this is better expressed as my consciousness of myself. But no, I cannot exist in both bodies at once. I must be either the android or the woman. While a human, I cannot use that body, save perhaps by remote control. It will essentially be my backup, retaining all my thoughts and memories, what I think of as my soul.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be amazed, or horrified. “Maauro, the risks!”
“There are some,” she concedes, “but I judge them small, particularly against what is to be gained. Are we not here, gambling our lives for money, for freedom to be who and what we are? Is not all of our existence a gamble?”
I shook my head. “You said you were not sure of whether this was possible?”
“Yes. I asked Shasti if a body could be made, adult, and as similar to my appearance as can be managed. Yet, such a body must be devoid of consciousness of its own, but be able to support the brain that would be mine. By definition such a brain must be highly abnormal and still somehow be viable.”
“The more I hear of this, the more scared I get.”
“Doesn’t the thought of holding a soft, light body of mine against yours encourage you? I would be like Olivia then.”
Before I could reply with whatever the hell I was going to say, her head snapped around in pure machine motion. “Our enemy is on the move.”
This time I heard it, a fall of rock.
Maauro moved closer to me. “I must move forward and engage it. I do not like our odds of fleeing out on to an open plain.”
“The hell you will. We’ll go together. Maybe I can draw its attention and you can attack.”
“That is precisely what you will not do,” she demanded fiercely. “You are too fragile to be exposed, and defending you will pin me.
“I won’t let you face this alone.”
“Then stay back, when I engage, look for an opportunity to get your laser in play.”
“OK, but if I say break off and run—”
“Wrik, I should really be in charge here. I am better at this.”
We glared at each other for a few seconds, then I said. “Yes, dear.”
She kissed me. “By which you mean you will do what you damn well please regardless of my good sense.”
“It usually works out.”
“Stay two meters behind me.”
Maauro advanced, her palm blades extended, her arms held before her in a way that would be awkward for the human she mimicked. I knew that high velocity armor piercing darts were in her fingers and that she could cover forearms in plasma fire and even jet it over short distances. Neither of us had regarded personal weapons as a factor in the fight against the giant Beast. We hadn’t anticipated this situation. I longed for a triple-auto rifle, and knew Maauro must be regretting not having brought her armspac.
We moved forward in short rushes between bits of cover. Despite the biting cold, sweat slicked my sides. My lungs strained in the thin dusty air.
Maauro paused by a short bit of wall, holding her arm straight up in the infantry sign for a halt. Across what must have once been a small street, stood more complete one-story buildings. The line of them indicated that some had been several stories tall and had fallen in. Beyond the first row were taller buildings and a few cracked domes. The cloud of dust towering over us had dissipated some, but the light had also dimmed in the planet’s quick day. The ringed world hung in the sky over us like an evil omen.
Maauro looked both ways, as if considering crossing the open space, then froze. I followed the line of her eyes. At the end of the street lay a slab of gray metal the size of an aircar; it was oddly shaped, almost in the form of a bubble tent. I wanted to ask her if our enemy was behind, or under it, but didn’t dare the sound, or the distraction.
Then it moved, and I knew if for the Beast itself. The metal shape pivoted on each of the four corners that bent down to the ground like the feet of a hunting animal. It pivoted slowly, unsteadily. Was it limping?
Maauro and it moved at the same instant. She blurred across the street, up onto the top of the wrecked building, raising dust and chips of debris as she moved. It spotted her, and humped around faster than I would have thought possible. Two spears of metal jetted from its body, toward her. A long buzzing sound indicated that Maauro’s fingers were firing a barrage of flechettes. These dimpled the Beast’s metal hide and seemed to sting the creature.
The spears of metal missed Maauro, but suddenly flexed into more supple tentacles. Surprised, she avoided one, but another wrapped around her left arm. She slammed a palm blade into it with a great clang and an immense spark, but the metal did not part.
I aimed for the tentacle, realized that I might miss it entirely, or hit Maauro, and retargeted it for the base of the tentacle. The laser licked out at full power and bit in. As with the flechettes, the laser burn clearly caused pain and damage. It might look like a tank but it wasn’t.
Another spear of metal launched. I threw myself backwards as it flashed over me, burying itself in the wall, behind me which exploded into flinders of stone, some cutting my face.
