H-2791 paused, unable to proceed without additional commands. Kowal had been bisected but was most likely alive. It would take a good deal more material to truly crush Jaree like that, unless they managed to shatter their brain case. If they were dead, H-2791 could return to the ship and await further orders. It took a second of time for all of the commands to fully process before H-2791 bent down and began trying to sift through the rubble for Kowal or Jaree. That woman, whoever she was, had been something of a surprise. Jaree had shot her right in the chest, with magic users it was best to visually confirm death, but H-2791 suspected she was dead.
She found Kowal first, his eyes blank as his trunk scurried out from under the wreckage without his lower legs. He didn’t speak, but rather pointed back to the rubble like a mute animal and waited for H-2791. Delay would have earned her further mistreatment from Kowal, so she set about digging for his legs right away. She found them before she found Jaree.
Once they were free, Kowal’s torso set about reconnecting itself with his lower half. H-2791 supposed others might have found the process disturbing with its liquid smacking sounds and the way fluids seeped out of where the torso and lower body were connected.
Kowal himself appeared completely unaffected by the process. Most likely because he employed a neural shunt to turn off the sensation while his body repaired itself. When it stopped moving and the seam between his torso and hips closed, Kowal blinked his eyes and looked around. “Did I fucking die?”
Perhaps Jaree would have come up with a pithy response to the question. “No.” H-2791 only had the truth. “We are still aboard the derelict cylinder attempting to subdue the occupants.”
“That’s…” Kowal choked on the denial. “Shit. Where’s Jaree?”
H-2791 pointed to the still-sealed tunnel. “They are buried beneath the rubble.”
“Ha, what an idiot.” Kowal sneered at the rubble pile, clearly unaffected by the fact H-2791 had pulled him out from under there. “I guess we can’t go that way and completing the mission is more important than Jaree’s life. Oh well.” Without looking at her, he said to H-2791, “get me a…” he snapped his fingers, “an alternate route to that lady and the kid. Do it now.”
H-2791 had already plotted such a route as part of her contingency plans. “It will take a little bit of time, but there is a different service tunnel which should connect to the same outlet at this one.”
“Spare me the fucking details, just tell me where to go.”
That was easier anyway. H-2791 sent the instructions to Kowal over their subnet. He stomped off, down a different tunnel access, leading the way along the course H-2791 had plotted. It made more tactical sense for H-2791 to lead, but she wasn’t equipped to question his orders. Better to just stay quiet.
The tunnels they took to catch up with the two squatters led through a swampy, wet section of tunnels with water leaking in up to their ankles. Kowal complained non-stop the whole way, lamenting the state of his suit, his legs, his hair, his everything. For someone so recently cut in half, he was very concerned about his attire.
It should have been humorous, but the inhibitors continued to prevent her from experiencing emotions.
Several switchbacks later, they crept up to where the two squatters should have been. They found the woman’s corpse, a clean hole in her chest marking where Jaree shot her. “Fuck yeah, Jaree isn’t completely useless, eh?” He grinned and shook the woman’s body. “Nailed the mother, good job Jaree. Let’s go get Bambi.”
H-2791 didn’t understand the reference, but she didn’t need to. Their path led them out of the tunnels and out into the former surface of the cylinder. Olfactory anguish did not happen to H-2791, her sensors were tuned against toxic or potentially dangerous chemicals. Kowal on the other hand wasn’t prepared for the incredible amount of rot and mold hanging in the air. He gagged the moment he took a breath. It was incredible to H-2791 that Kowal would have a cybernetic body cable of repairing itself as thoroughly as her own while still failing to filter out unpleasant airborne substances.
“This is fucking hell.” Kowal retched through the gloom.
H-2791 could not agree with the engineer. Darkness suited her, the fog graced her carapace, the exposed parts, with a film of water. She shivered under the totally unique sensation. As to the smells, while nauseating to baseline humans, to H-2791 they were a melange of first time experiences. She took a large sample of the air through one of her arm units for later analysis.
Half a dozen different subroutines kicked in, metacognitive foreign code intended to mark the development of higher thought. H-2791 could read the code herself, excess processing capacity red-lining as meta-meta-meta and so forth processes monitored and examined each other.
She shut the whole tangent down, it occurred over less than two microseconds. Not even enough time for Kowal to stop his retching.
“Let’s get on with it.” He didn’t move, just looked expectantly at H-2791. “Well, fucking track the little beast. Tell me where she went.”
Right. He hadn’t been explicit and H-2791 was a little caught up in a cognition storm. Activating her full suite of scanners as well as the external hookups from the cylinder, H-2791 could tell the girl had come through here. But the weather and moisture spoiled her thermal tracking capabilities and also inhibited her ability to sense the depressions the child made with her feet.
Two sets of tracks appeared to lead away from the maintenance tunnel. They both went in the same general direction, though one set had fewer large footprints spread through them. That track veered toward the water.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“Kor.” For some reason Kowal had left his mask off and was still huffing the air in here. “We could repurpose this place into a food production factory. Make serious cred. Look at all this water and bio-activity. Could turn this hell into a gold mine, heh heh.” He approached the mushrooms and sealed himself up at once. They passed through a cloud of spores and Kowal brushed the stuff off of him, creating wind which only stirred up more spores.
Curiosity suppressed more actively now, H-2791 had a brief urge to look up Kowal’s CV to figure out how someone so easily distracted and… frankly stupid managed to become an engineer. And then how he had survived with Admiral Malorn for so long. It also stopped her from collecting a sample of the mushrooms. But it didn’t force her to release the air sample she’d taken earlier. Not that she had any satisfaction from her minor victory.
The spore didn’t affect her. Incidental capture of samples here was unavoidable. A faint ghost of a smirk crossed H-2791’s face. Foreign code kicked in again, but found the limits to what it could force on H-2791. She was still missing that one little piece that would free her from his digital cage.
Up ahead the tracks split. H-2791 narrowed her eyes at the way those tracks looked, but she had to pause to consider the options. The left set went down into another service tunnel below the mainland of the cylinder. The front set wandered off into the mists. “What kind of cyberware did the family possess?” She directed her question to their Theurg, Kalvin.
Kowal cut in. “What the fuck does that matter?”
“Adults had standard sets, nothing fancy. Though the woman had a fairly potent null on her, when we cracked it, showed nothing.”
“The child?”
“Not a wire.”
Kowal grabbed her. “Why did you stop?”
H-2791 tilted her head. “I have not stopped, but there are two sets of tracks. I wanted to know if the child had cyberware because perhaps she has a way to avoid the spores or other airborne dangers. I believe the child went into the tunnels. The forward tracks are a misdirect.”
He licked his lips and narrowed his eyes at her, throat bobbing to make it clear he was speaking in his own head. “Fine. Let’s go then.” Shouldering past her, Kowal kicked the door open and shouted into the darkness of the service corridors. “We’re coming for you you little bitch. And we’re gonna fuck your eye sockets when we find you.” One step later and the ancient printed plastic cracked and gave way.
H-2791 was too far away to catch him before Kowal tumbled down into the service area, banging his body on exposed metal and generally tearing himself up. When she found him at the bottom of the stairwell, he’d broken his neck and several other reinforced bones. Tears streaked with red leaked out of his eyes as he whimpered over the narrow band. A few seconds later his eyes went blank and he sat up, his neck bent at an unnatural angle.
It righted itself and the scent of chemical sealant told H-2791 what he’d done to repair the injury. After a few more seconds, Kowal’s eyes blinked and he lost his glassy stare. “Fuck this. Go find that little bitch and bring her back to me alive. Rip off a hand if you have to. Do it now!”
H-2791 lacked so much as the faintest echo of resistance. She took off at a sprint now, no longer inhibited by Kowal’s slow movements and restrictive orders. There was no pleasure or challenge in killing a child. Under normal circumstances, H-2791 might have abhorred such an action. Laden as she was with inhibition code, she could only speculate, to say nothing of resist. But now, she had no choice. Might as well try and salvage some fraction of the circumstances.
The scent trail thickened and H-2791 slowed. For it to have gathered, the girl would have had to either stop or be close by. H-2791 activated her sensors and noticed something off in the water flowing through the next part of the corridor. It had an unusually high concentration of organic and nutritive adulterants. Exhibiting an overabundance of caution, she tossed a small micro drone at the pool. The pop and subsequent electrical discharge dimmed the lights in the corridor and forced a set of auxiliary generators to kick on.
After a few seconds, the remote drone reset and flew back to H-2791. It had been overloaded by a massive current spike. Someone, likely the girl, had spiked the otherwise pure water with electrolytes and probably activated a circuit shunt into the water in the first place. Well this was a bit more challenging after all. What kind of ten-year old laid traps?
Come to think of it, had the spores been a trap too? Kowal had fallen into it. Plus the girl had probably laid a false trail and walked back on her own tracks in the muddy sands above. A part of H-2791 regretted the need to kill her. Or would have if not for lingering bits of code and hypnotic blocks interfering with her cognition.
Another meta-analysis gave her pause. H-2791’s thought process was evolving over time. This self-doubting algorithm was new, as was the apparent psychic fragmentation she was experiencing. The bloody purpose the Mal-wares had put her to had a cost on H-2791, presumably. That or something about her underlying code was changing. Whatever it was occurred beyond H-2791’s ability to perceive or call to mind. Buried code like that gave her a vague sense of discomfort and set her back on her course: bring this too-clever child back to Kowal, so he could presumably torture her.
H-2791 followed the pheromone trail deeper into the tunnels. These service hallways made their own Thesean maze, the girl’s scent both the map and H-2791’s guide back out. How did she know about Theseus and the minotaur in the first place? H-2791 couldn’t find the origin of that information in her skull.
At the same time she set herself to pondering this question, the scent trail ended. It just stopped. H-2791 blinked and shook her head, code running at mad while additional processors cycled through possibilities. This was a real conundrum here.
There were no portals, doors, hatches, or any other form of escape from where H-2791 stood. Literally in the middle of a solid length of hall, the girl’s scent trail stopped. It was even beginning to fade… but wrong. That was H-2791’s first clue as to what had happened. The scent trail should have faded from behind H-2791, not from where the trail ended. In other words, the girl had repeated her move from above: she’d doubled back and somehow kept H-2791 from noticing the branch.
Chemical sensors scanning the air as thoroughly as possible, H-2791 had trouble as she moved back determining where the concentration of the girl’s scent was strongest. When it dropped, she froze and took a few steps back.
Scanners caught the anomaly at once: the first time she’d passed through here, H-2791 had ignored the thermal blanket covering a small hatch because it had resembled the material around it and she’d mistaken it for a standard vent cover. With a touch, H-2791 interfaced with the piezoelectric controller on the blanket and turned it supple. Not only was the vent she’d crawled into small, but it was out of the way. Anyone but H-2791 would probably never have found her hiding place.
There was that vague regret again. H-2791 hoped Kowal would not force her to watch him torture the child as she crawled up into the vent shaft and compressed her form into one small enough to move through the plenum. H-2791 could hear the girl breathing and softly weeping, desperately trying to quiet herself. Until now, the child’s scent had not been so polluted by fear-stink. She must have heard H-2791 approaching.