Activation Degradation, page 6
If only it had possessed the foresight to bring morphine. Something that might ease the cessation of both it and its craft’s biological functions.
Unit Two had been in such pain when it was decommissioned.
Would suffocating hurt like that?
It had no memory of its previous deactivations. It didn’t know if other versions of Unit Four had suffered when they ceased.
It knew of death, but it did not know death.
Suddenly, a slight jolt altered the direction of spin.
Unit Four’s pumps felt like they flipped over in the cage of its chassis, so abrupt was the change of rotation.
Then another jolt followed.
And another.
The invaders.
Unit Four wasn’t sure why it had taken them so long to address the problem, but they were finally acting.
Responding.
The tumbling began to feel like a corkscrew, and then like a slide.
The robot reactivated the chromatophores.
Only a small corner of the screen could see space.
Slowly, surely, the stars stopped being blurs, became circular streaks, and eventually righted themselves into pinpricks of light.
Not once did the gas giant make an appearance.
With nothing left to do, AMS Unit Four waited, steeled itself.
Perhaps the robot and its boat would be granted a quick deactivation after all. Perhaps the aliens would find a way to blast them off their hide.
The centrifugal forces slowed. The robot began to float within the confines of its harness.
What would the aliens do now?
Long minutes passed. A quarter of an hour, a half.
Nothing changed.
Occasionally, there was the creak of metal, the straining yawn of stressors on the boat.
But nothing else.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Until—
Something covered the exterior sensors, made the chromatophores go dark. And it could hear them—invaders, crawling on the boat.
They sounded heavy. The bangs and thumps reverberating all around it meant mass. These creatures were no delicate waifs.
And then, slicing. Not with anti-plasma, like they’d used to harvest from the array, and not with a laser. This was mechanical—the sound of blades.
Something with teeth.
They were tearing into the boat.
The biomass around it heaved, shuddered.
There was nothing AMS Unit Four could do to stop the cutting.
Nothing it could do to save—
A saw blade breached the inside. Everything around Unit Four pulsated, revolted.
The harness clamped down more firmly on Unit Four’s chassis, and the robot tried to pull away.
A spew of dark-brown, black, and red fluids cut the chromatophore display down the center. The controls were awash in ichor as they clutched and unclutched at the air—searching frantically for the robot’s grasping pads or stuttering with numerous impulses sent from severed lines.
The boat couldn’t scream, so Unit Four screamed for it.
It struggled against the harness as more liquids sprayed through the wound—the incision growing larger and larger by the moment. Frantically, it took one harness arm in both grasping pads and broke it—heard the inner hard frame snap, while the outer skin kept it whole.
The biomass around the cut started to turn a molted gray as Unit Four kicked out from beneath the harness. Something long and metallic—like a monstrous version of the surgical spreaders—slipped into the cut and wrenched both halves aside.
Unit Four expected a sucking. A rushing of atmosphere out into nothing. Physics trying to equalize what could only be equal in the end, at the heat death of the universe.
But the invaders had created some kind of seal. A makeshift airlock, between their craft and its.
Scrambling, AMS Unit Four kicked around its seat, clawed its way to the concave curve of the far wall, opposite the puncture.
Pressing itself into the dying biomass, it tried to regain its composure. To prepare.
Something was coming through the wound. A bright, blinding spotlight.
An invader was entering its ship.
Unit Four held up a grasping pad, doing its best to protect its cameras from white-out.
This was it. If it could somehow make it out of this, get back to the platform, it would know. It would have seen.
“Whatever you are, we come in—by the gods,” someone said.
Someone not in its CPU.
Someone it could hear with its shell’s outer microphones.
Someone with activated speakers on the outside of their own shell.
Someone it could understand.
The language wasn’t the language of the platform—wasn’t what it spoke with its handler or its siblings—but it was a language in its database.
Which meant it couldn’t be alien at all.
“Holy fuck, what the fuck, what the actual fuck?” The voice held nothing but pure, unadulterated horror.
“I’m—I’m gonna—” said another voice, strained.
“Don’t you fucking—”
A wet, slopping sound.
The spotlight went out.
Unit Four froze.
Halfway through the breach, covered in the boat’s sputtering fluids—
No.
No, how?
—was another bipedal robot.
Just like it.
Part Two
Invader
Chapter Six
One robot—in a thick, flexible outer shell, but still unmistakably of a similar design as Unit Four—stumbled inside, and was followed by another. Then another. The three of them looked at the arms of their own shells as though stunned, taking in the wetness—the dark color—that now stained their bright-green exteriors. Their CPU housings were hidden beneath bulbous casings, the fronts of which obscured their primary sensors behind a coppery, metallic sheen.
The boat’s fluid pumps still worked, sending throbbing spurts of the slick, oxygenated compound into the air. The interior of the sphere was soon fogged with free-floating droplets, which landed on their shells. The red shone on the copper, and the green fabric made the fluids run brown.
The air was filled with the boat’s liquefied life-force. Choked with it, like a swirling, dirty rain. But still, the curtain it created wasn’t enough to obscure Unit Four’s presence.
“There’s somebody in here!”
“Somebody?”
“It’s not—I don’t know, what the fuck, man? What is this shit?”
“What are you waiting for?”
“This isn’t—I’m not going to just kill—”
“Then get the fuck out of the way and I’ll do it. Bastard tried to blow us out of the sky, I don’t care if—”
“Jonas, stop!”
One of the new robots pushed another out of the way, floating to the fore.
Unit Four had no time for higher processing.
Its close-quarters combat programming engaged.
The unit designated Jonas raised a small gun. The weapon’s design was unfamiliar, matched nothing in Unit Four’s databanks.
But, fundamentally, a gun was a gun was a gun.
Jonas aimed.
Unit Four activated a jet on its hard-body, blasting itself away from the wall, hurtling itself to the side just as Jonas shot.
Unit Four slammed into another portion of the dying biomass—the flesh giving way just enough, absorbing the impact just enough, to protect the robot from injury. Unit Four clung to it, digging the points of its grasping pads into the fluttering spiracles, holding on so that it would not rebound toward its attackers.
What on Earth was going on?
How had robots gotten ahold of an alien wedge? When?
Why were they using it to carve up the Jovian mine?
Unit Four’s processing stumbled. It wasn’t designed for these kinds of inquiries—and it had no way to search for answers while still under assault.
All it had known in this iteration was run run run, attack attack attack.
It had hoped all of that had come to an end.
It had hoped it would be allowed to rest. Even if that meant deactivation, at least this constant fervor of pain and conflict would stop.
But no.
With a roar, it shoved itself away from the wall, turning all of its hard-body’s jets on full-blast, aiming itself at Jonas.
None of the other robots were prepared.
Jonas had no time to raise its gun again.
One hard-body connected with another—Unit Four crashed into Jonas, and in turn, Jonas’s back crashed into the curve of the boat.
Unit Four kept its jets on, using them to pin the other robot in place. The AMS unit planted its feet in the middle of Jonas’s chest and scrabbled for its gun arm—twisting, wrenching.
Jonas screamed as Unit Four yanked its arm from its socket. Its outer shell did not beak or puncture, but the arm went limp and the gun floated out of its grasp.
The new robots shouted over one another:
“Melassani’s Crystals,” one gasped. “Priestess, Doc—we’re going to need you! I don’t—I—”
“Ah, fuck!” Jonas yelled. “How did they—?”
“Shit. Shit shit shit shit,” the third chanted, over and over.
“Fuentes!” the first one shouted at it.
Before the set could regain their composure—before their backup arrived—Unit Four had to end this.
It shot away from Jonas, using the other robot’s abdomen like a launching pad, springing for the floating gun.
The firearm slipped effortlessly into its grasping pad, fitting against its digits as though made to pair with Unit Four’s exact design.
The robot who’d called for backup had its own gun drawn—but raised it an instant too late.
Unit Four fired—caught it square in the abdomen with the hot glow of a laser charge.
The shot pushed it back into its muttering comrade, but—to Unit Four’s dismay—the charge did little more than eat away at the outer layer of its shell’s fabric. A round, singed hole in its sternum revealed more armor beneath.
Unit Four had no idea if its own hard-body could withstand such a blast.
Determined not to give the invaders a moment’s rest, it shot again, but redirected its aim.
It had been able to separate Jonas’s joint—the connections of its upper chassis had been flimsy. So perhaps—
The charge caught its adversary in the shoulder. The robot hissed, cursed.
Shadows moved behind the gaping wound in the boat’s wall. Unit Four caught a brief glimpse of two more robots.
“They’ve got Jonas’s gun!” someone shouted.
“Then get them inside, damnit, you idiots!”
“You want to bring them aboard?”
Unit Four fired again, its aim slightly off as one of the hard-body’s jets petered out—its fuel exhausted.
The AMS unit tumbled to the side, barrel-rolling through the center of the boat as the two extra robots made their presence fully known.
“Rush! We’ve got to rush ’em!” cried Jonas, still slumped and floating near where Unit Four had thrust it into the wall.
“You’re right, you’re right. Come on, circle them.”
The entire group of five pushed off simultaneously, springing straight for Unit Four.
The boat’s interior was tight. It took no time at all for them to glom on.
Unit Four fired haphazardly—kicking, flailing, blasting its jets—and the six robots became a tangle of hard-bodied limbs. Its shots made contact with more shells, but not a single invader-bot was deterred. Not even the one with the limp arm.
The gun was immediately wrestled from Unit Four’s grip as the others tackled its joints, its limbs. An arm from behind caught it under the CPU housing, putting pressure on the connecting bits between its body and processing components. The AMS unit reached up to try to free itself, but both its grasping pads were twisted away, yanked to the side. It continued to struggle, but an invader-bot took hold of each leg as well.
Unit Four found itself suspended between the five robots, each doing its best to control a point of its body. They used small jets on their own suits to keep their distances steady, but they weren’t powerful enough to prevent Unit Four from curling its extremities, from pulling its attackers in, then thrashing outward in an attempt to throw them off.
The entire bundle of bodies spun in the degrading boat’s interior.
Unit Four thought to shout at them—to rage at them. Its fluids were roaring once again, making its microphones fuzzy and thick with a static buzzing. Its engineered musculature was hot—boiling with a new burst of adrenaline, this time not from a premeasured dose, but from its own glands. Every bit of its body was struggling and denying, why not its speakers, too?
But despite the rush of compounds through its system, its higher processing had not been shoved entirely to the side. Unit Four understood the value of listening.
It was cornered. Trapped.
Anything it said could be turned around and used against it.
Better to keep silent while it tried to figure out how to derail its attackers.
“Motherfucker is hella strong,” said the unit on Four’s right arm.
“Maybe it’s the suit,” suggested another.
“I don’t think so. There’s a fucking warrior under here.”
I’m not a Berserker, it shot back internally.
“Come on, Doc, you’ve got the best angle, take the shot,” insisted Jonas—who had Unit Four by the CPU chassis.
“I’m not going to kill anyone.”
“Damn your Hippocratic-whatever, they tried to kill us.”
“And can’t now.”
“Aren’t you even a little curious?” asked the one called Priestess, arms curled around Unit Four’s right leg. “About—?” It nodded up and down Unit Four.
“Melassani’s fucking Crystals—they nearly tore my arm clean off!” Jonas shouted. “So, no, I don’t give a damn.”
“We’re not going to kill someone pinned down by five people,” declared the one Unit Four had shot in the chest. This robot carried an authoritative air—perhaps it was their lead unit. “We’ll bring them aboard, just like Doc said. I have a hell of a lot of questions, and we’re not getting any answers if they’re dead, now are we?”
“Whatever,” Jonas grumbled.
“What was that?”
“Whatever, sir.”
“Oh, screw you.”
“Screw you right back.”
Unit Four understood nearly every word, but they were all garbled—placed in an order that made no sense. It had no frame of reference for this type of robot behavior.
“We need to quarantine them,” Doc explained, and the group slowly started to move toward the wound in the boat, with the clear intent to carry Unit Four through. “Get them into deCon. Decontaminate their suit just like we decontaminate supplies, then check them for active viral and bacterial colonies. Make sure they’re not contagious—cross check their antibodies with strains from different Harbors. We might be able to figure out where they’re from that way.”
“What about this Frankensteinian shit-show?” asked the Fuentes unit. “I want to get some samples myself.”
Unit Four didn’t like the way it said “samples”: cold, unfeeling, as though the boat wasn’t also its kin—of its tissues, of its chemicals. The boats and the robots and the biomechanical arms and the flesh-based servers were all the same. Were all, in some way, connected.
This robot made the boat sound like a curiosity—distant and disgusting.
Unit Four’s disdain for these robots grew, overpowering its sense of confusion, leaving it with a sour flavor in its fuel pipes and a hard knot in its interior.
“We should just destroy it, not prod at it,” Jonas spat. “There’s not a single Harbor that would build an abomination like this, you know that. Not one. Not even Orca’s End.”
“Someone had to make it—” Fuentes started.
“My vote’s for those fuckers who took over—”
“—and we can’t make any assumptions when we don’t have any damned data.”
“We’re trawlers, not scientists.”
“Maybe you’re not, but I—”
“Now is not the time,” Doc said.
Unit Four wanted them to squabble. The more they focused on each other, the less attention they paid it. Carefully, it tested each of their grips in turn, noting whose was loosening, faltering. Doc’s was little more than a light touch on its leg.
All six units would be unable to transverse the breach in the boat at the same time, Unit Four was certain. The invaders would have to decide how best to maneuver their prisoner, which would give Four another chance to break away, to claim another weapon.
If these had been Four’s sister units, there would be no way it could overpower them. Two would be enough to subdue the one.
But, even now, these five robots were barely able to keep Unit Four pinned between them. The invader-bots appeared to be of similar design as Four, but clearly they’d been modified for a completely different purpose.
A purpose they had to be defying. A purpose they had to be subverting.
Clearly every last one of these robots needed to be decommissioned.
It would decide what to do about the boat and the invader’s ship once these units were no longer a threat.
“Easy now,” the one called “Sir” said. “Feet first. Doc, maybe you should go on ahead. Okeke, can you handle both feet?”
“Got ’em.”
Both the Priestess and Doc units did as instructed, with Doc disappearing immediately through the still-spluttering wound.
Unit Four didn’t kick, as was its instinct.
It could wait.
Be patient.
Prepare for the most opportune moment.
“Good,” Sir said. “Fuentes, help me pull their arms up, past their head, like—yeah.”
Instead of being pulled in five directions, Unit Four was now one long line, with three robots managing its upper body and one guiding its lower.
“Come on, I want to make this quick. There’s still a lot of rubble flying around out there. Sooner we get inside, the better.”
