Rubicon, page 29
The monolith of power sat deep within the complex, a dense concentration of electronics simultaneously localized and ubiquitous. Its potency reminded her of how the power source had felt at the ruined space station so many weeks ago. But instead of generating electricity like the singularity had, this one felt as though it was consuming it. Greedily drinking it from the walls like a protostar leaching mass from an interstellar cloud.
Then at once, the source vanished. Disappeared out through the copper veins of the facility like discharged static.
Adriene scanned her HUD. She’d never felt anything like that before.
What the hell was that?
// I’m not sure. From the cyclic power draw, I’d say the source was some kind of large-scale processor farm. But it appears to have shorted out; I can no longer access it through our network. //
Her pulse beat heavily in her eardrums. A processor farm … That had to be the objective.
Frustratingly, she couldn’t apprise Blackwell of that particular insight. Though her teammates had grown used to her seemingly unnatural abilities—attributing it to a mixture of the new pathfinder module and her “inherent skill”—something told her Blackwell might not be as willing to roll with it. To ensure he didn’t sideline her, she’d have to let the mission take its course and only intervene if it seemed like they might not make it out with the intel intact.
Finally Kato chirped, “Sorry for the wait, folks. We’re in.”
The wide door slid open. Within, a dim hallway branched in either direction.
In the corner of Adriene’s HUD, Blackwell’s bright white pip glowed as his low voice broke over comms. “Stormwalkers, clear right. Recon, on me.”
Lieutenant Rhett led the Stormwalkers to the right, toward what appeared to be the hangar’s control station. Blackwell took point as Forward Recon headed left down a short hall, which opened into a large vestibule. Blackwell and Brigham entered first, sweeping their aims to alternate corners to clear the room.
As Adriene followed them in, an ear-piercing klaxon rang out. Harsh orange light bathed the high walls of the two-story room. Adriene ducked, sliding into cover behind a short barricade just inside the door. In her HUD, her squad’s pips diverged as they split off to find cover.
Her pulse spiked, but overwatch remained quiet, and she could sense no Mechan in her expanded network. No pips or threat assessment meter appeared, and only her squad’s colored dots marred an otherwise clean map.
Gallagher’s level voice rang over comms, “No contacts, sir. Including defenses. Appears to only be an auditory alarm.”
Blackwell let out a gruff sigh. “Sergeant Kato—get that fuckin’ racket turned off, please.”
“Yes, sir.” Kato remained cross-legged where he’d taken cover, working between Rubie and his hyphen as the others stood, rifles raised and cautious.
Adriene swung her scope around the open atrium. Long, low, open metal boxes hashed out small areas of the large room, probably ancient planters, though any flora were long decomposed. It looked like a waiting room, devoid of any furniture remnants.
After a few minutes, the clanging alarm fell silent.
Kato slid his hyphen closed and joined them. “Sorry that took so long—the alarm wasn’t part of the main system. Looks like a retrofit after the site got built, so it was livin’ on its own partition.”
Rhett’s smooth, calculated voice called over comms, “Rhett for Major Blackwell.”
“Go for Blackwell.”
“All clear and a dead end this way, sir. Coming back to you.”
The four Stormwalker pips began to move toward the atrium. Recon followed Blackwell to the far side of the room, where they formed up and waited in front of the exit.
Kato edged up to Adriene’s shoulder and nudged her. He tapped something into his hyphen, and her HUD pinged with an incoming data packet.
It opened, displaying a video recording from the security system he’d just hacked. It showed a grainy view of the room from a camera high above the door frame. Blackwell appeared first, then Brigham, the system scanning each with a jittering yellow overlay. When Adriene’s figure stepped in after them, her outline flashed and highlighted crimson. A series of unreadable symbols burst onto the screen, and the system switched to high alert.
Adriene attempted to steady her racing pulse, then switched to a private line with Kato. “What the hell?”
“No idea.” Kato scoffed, though he seemed mostly amused. “Fuckin’ weird, huh?”
“Yeah…” She forced out a chuckle, though she knew how nervous and raw-edged it must have sounded. “I guess they think I’m the bad guy.”
“Guess so.” Kato slid his hyphen shut and shrugged. “We’re not not the enemy.”
She bit the inside of her lip and nodded. Except it wasn’t we. It was she.
// I mean, it’s probably me. I’m very scary. //
She sighed.
// Actually, I’m not joking. It has to be me. //
I know, but that doesn’t make sense. This is an Architect facility, built before they’d even invented Mechan. They wouldn’t have had any reason to red-flag an AI.
// Just because I usually have all the answers doesn’t mean I always have all the answers. //
Trust me, I know.
// You expect too much from me sometimes. //
Can we go back to you being quiet?
// Yes, sir. //
With a synchronous clunking of boots, the Stormwalkers marched in and joined them.
Blackwell nodded. “Engaging DCM.”
He pushed out a directive, triggering their Rubicons to engage a new mode that’d scan for data concentrations. In Adriene’s HUD, Augur Team’s suits glowed green, threading through with a distinct, hard-edged chartreuse light—data streaming to various subsystems of their suits, and to and from their Rubicons.
Adriene glanced around the atrium, where the occasional flicker of yellow-green data flowed within the walls.
Wyatt let out a sharp exhale. “Mira’s fiery end, Valero.”
Adriene turned to find all eight of them staring at her.
Coleson tilted his wide head. “You some kinda savant or somethin’?”
“Must be a bug,” Gallagher grumbled, tapping on the side of her helmet as if it might clear the issue.
Adriene swallowed and looked between her squadmates and the others in nervous confusion. Blackwell stared as well, his light gray suit stoic and silent at the back of the group.
Before Adriene could form a question, a video opened in her HUD: Kato sharing the feed from his own suit cam. It took her a moment to reorient. Kato faced her, so she should be seeing herself, but her form was obstructed by a vast, glowing, sparking chartreuse mass. It covered her head, trailing down her neck, even a ways into her upper back and shoulders.
Brigham shifted, swapping his rifle stock to his opposite shoulder. “From all your rezones,” he said, tone seemingly assured, though there was a forced edge to it. He gave her a stiff pat on the shoulder. “Eh, Ninety-Six?”
“Yeah,” she agreed, willing steadiness into her voice. “It’s probably that.”
Kato’s visor feed disappeared. Adriene inhaled, shoring up belief in her own words. It was definitely because of all her rezones.
// Seriously? It’s me again. //
Shut. Up.
Blackwell gave a loose shake of his head. “Well, we don’t need to see every damn bit of code floatin’ around anyway.”
// Filtering … //
The green from their suits disappeared, as well as most of the small trails that weaved through the walls.
“We’re lookin’ for somethin’ big, fivers,” Blackwell said with the definitive, bureaucratic air of steering them back on track. “Keep a sharp eye, and remember the DCM won’t work through walls or obstructions, so look behind, under, and within every nook and cranny. On me.”
Augur Team methodically worked their way through the dim, dust-laden corridors. They found each room filled with some variety of rusted worktables, broken lab equipment, empty storage cabinets, dysfunctional terminals, and complicated but delicate decaying machinery. The place had clearly been some kind of research site—though what they’d had to research on this barren, backwater planet, Adriene had no idea. She expected to discover more of the coffin-like monoliths she’d seen at every other site they’d been at the last two months, but so far, there’d been no sign of them.
They’d cleared almost half the massive facility when they approached the largest chamber shown on the rough schematic sketched up in their HUDs by their survey drones. Kato bet it was a mess hall, while Coleson and Wyatt put money on a secondary hangar. Adriene took Gallagher’s side that it was some kind of controlled-environment storage, related to whatever the site had been researching. But they were all wrong.
They formed up at the sealed entrance as Wyatt connected to the control panel via her hyphen. A tiny node of chartreuse light shone from the interface, an indication of the small bit of data sent to trigger the controls. The door split and slid open.
Within, broad overhead light banks clicked on in staggered waves. The high-ceilinged room sloped away at a slight angle, lined with rows upon rows of freestanding server racks. Each slightly curved row arced away on either side of the wide, central aisle, extending to the outer walls. The main aisle culminated in a metal guardrail that framed a sunken control arena at the foot of the room.
Wyatt took a slow step in. “Mira’s end,” she cursed, gaze drifting over the vast room.
“Yeah…” Kato exhaled his agreement, and Adriene unconsciously nodded along with the engineers. This was one of the largest remote server rooms she’d ever seen.
Adriene chewed the inside of her lip. Mira help them if this was what West needed them to recover in “one, functional piece.” They’d be hauling enclosures, processors, and data cores back to the Aurora for a week straight.
Coleson’s violet-lined suit rails glowed as he said, “This has to be it, right? The target intel?”
Blackwell made a noncommittal grunt. “Fan out,” he ordered. “Clear the room.”
Blackwell and the Stormwalkers headed right, and with a quick hand motion, Brigham ordered Forward Recon left. He pushed out assignments to their HUDs, and they headed to their appointed rows.
Adriene stepped into hers, sighting down her rifle as she cleared the long arc of flush server enclosures set behind doors mounted on inset hinges. Not a single exterior status light flickered, and no telltale thrum of powered electronics or fans stifled the air.
Adriene crept down the aisle to where one of the cabinet doors sat ajar. She cracked it open with an elbow. Her Rubicon activated her scope light and she swept it around the interior of the housing. Within, a melted, charred mass of circuitry and bundled cabling, caked in black soot and white ash. The inside of the rack’s grated metal frame was covered in flaky, brassy-orange rust.
“Shit,” she muttered under her breath.
She paced down a few meters and gripped the recessed handle of another cabinet door. It resisted with a shrill groan of corroded hinges, but her suit-assisted yank overcame its protests.
Inside, more scorched remains.
Stepping back, Adriene inspected both sides of the reinforced, powder-coated metal door. The fireproof door.
She stared back at the fused circuitry within. No acrid scent of burnt electronics or rubber lingered on the air, even to her Rubicon-enhanced senses. This had happened a long time ago.
// Remember, this may not even be what we’re after. There’s still a significant portion of the facility to scout. //
His tone conveyed flat, assured confidence. Yet a faint, almost indiscernible secondary sense of unease had joined her own.
A semitransparent overlay appeared in her HUD. The facility map, highlighting the portion they had yet to explore.
// See? //
She sighed. “Yeah, maybe,” she conceded, realizing too late she’d spoken aloud.
“Valero?” Blackwell prompted.
“Sorry, sir.” She shook away her hesitation. “The racks are burned out over here.”
A moment later, Brigham grunted. “Damn, here too.”
“Here as well, sir,” Ivon commented from somewhere on the opposite side of the room.
One by one, the others voiced similar situations in their rows.
“Strange,” Rhett said, offhanded and airy, almost to herself.
“Yeah,” Gallagher agreed. “Why contain the destruction like this? Why not just destroy the whole black site—or at least this room?”
In her HUD, Adriene eyed the details of the facility scan, refined by her pathfinder module. It indicated reinforced bulkheads enclosing the large chamber, along with a few auxiliary rooms at the back. It would have been easy to contain the fire. Whoever had done this had been trying to keep the room intact, for whatever reason. Hopefully that meant there was something left to find.
“Everyone keep looking,” Blackwell ordered, frustration thick in his surly tone. “If they left somethin’ untouched, let’s find it.”
The Stormwalkers and Blackwell kept to the right half while Forward Recon continued to alternate rows on the left. They inspected each of the dozens of server cabinets, working their way down to the lowest level of the sloped room.
A half hour later, Adriene stood inspecting the penultimate row on their side when a soft click sounded in her ear. Her gaze focused onto her HUD’s comms module. Kato had opened a direct line.
“Ninety-Six?” His voice rang cautious, thin, and … concerned.
Her shoulders stiffened. “What’s wrong?”
“Come take a look at this?”
Adriene’s focus drew to her map, and she picked out his blue pip, oriented herself, and turned on her heel, stock tight to her shoulder. She found him at the base of the central aisle, standing in front of the safety railing overlooking the sunken control arena.
“What is it?” she asked. “Are those the server control terminals down there?”
“I don’t think so.” The new, flat monotone to his voice was even more worrying than the concern had been. He lifted a hand and waved her toward him with a flick of his fingers.
She stepped to stand over Kato’s shoulder, matching his gaze. The railing encircled a large, oval pit, sunken a half story down and ringed by inactive control panels, keyboard interfaces, and large banks of dark monitors.
The feature causing Kato’s troubling range of vocal tones rested at the center of the space: an indiscernible mass encased in the glowing green overlay of their HUD’s data concentration mode. The strands arced out from the source in every direction like curls of plasma dancing off the surface of a star.
Adriene blinked hard, her eyes suddenly dry and scratchy.
Kato was right. That was not a control terminal.
Mute the data concentration filter.
// Blackwell’s Rubicon’s hosting it; I can’t shut it off for only you. I can override it, but it’s an all-or-nothing situation. //
That’s fine, do it.
// Doing it. //
The overlay disappeared. Underneath, a pile of scrap metal remained. A boxy jumble of sharp edges and convex planes, wound through with bulges of insulated cabling and shards of metal. Adriene’s mind worked overtime trying to make sense of it.
“What the…” she mumbled, but the question died out on her tongue as light glinted off the pile.
Kato let out a soft mewl from the back of his throat, a sound between skeptical curiosity and raw panic.
A barely audible hiss sounded—a soft, controlled movement of air like long-held hydraulics exhaling. With a whirring clatter, the pile unfolded. And began to stand.
Kato took a halting step backward. Adriene gripped his shoulders as he stumbled into her.
A familiar, ice-cold, stark clarity flashed over Adriene’s nerves, sharpening every sense.
Time slowed. Her mind ran faster as she took in a swarm of inputs, but—unlike the first time it’d happened in the ruins of that jungle planet—the feeling didn’t overwhelm her, didn’t terrify her down to her core. She’d had months of practice. They’d had months together, her and her Rubicon, and they were more synergized than ever. This time, she could handle it.
That didn’t make it any easier to stomach what she saw.
There had been something safe—freeing—about not being able to process the thing about to slaughter you in minute, crisp detail.
Kato’s chin lifted, higher, higher, and Adriene forced herself to match his gaze. The mass of metal continued to stand, in its own strangely slow, immutable way. Hinged beams unfolded and snapped into place with ragged, jittering hisses, shrill whirrs, and grinding mechanics.
Over the bones of its framework, exposed wires traced jointed metal columns like veins. Scuffed plates shifted into place over massive limbs and a thick torso. The dark metal chassis had a striated, tempered quality—each piece scuffed and worn, covered with furrows and gouges. She’d never seen anything like it.
A cacophony of chartreuse erupted in her HUD—the mute she’d put on the data concentration filter had reset. The smooth, lapping curls of green snapped straight, drawing thin and proliferating out into a gnarled mass of hard lines and sharp angles. Each movement caused a cascade of shifting angles and lines, a maelstrom of data spikes that ran up and down its limbs, extending along bundles of cabling that connected to open electrical panels in the walls of the oval pit.
Adriene stared. Mute … that …
// Just gonna cancel it … //
The green overlay disappeared.
“Valero?” Blackwell demanded. “Did you just deactivate the data concentration filter?”
She licked her dry lips and started to apologize, but decided not to bother. They didn’t need it anymore. They’d found their target. This … Mechan.
Which now stood upright, every piece of its chassis finally in place. It rolled back its broad shoulders as it straightened to its full height: over three meters, taller than any scrapper Adriene had ever seen.
