Chapter Nine: Dustup

Dagger lowered her gun, and huffed.

“If Greenie is what you said they are, that’s…” She shook her head. I didn’t know how to feel at that. She was talking about me like I was an unspeakable horror, a dark figure in the corner of her eye. Maybe I was. Maybe that’s exactly what I was. “But it doesn’t matter. Not right now. We have to go, like you said.”

“Of course, of course,” Zanzikai chattered irritably, still glaring into my fractured soul, “just let me kill them and I’ll be on my way. It’d take less time to kill them than it took to have this conversation.”

“We need soldiers. Whatever else they are, they’re a soldier. My soldier. My responsibility.”

“Are you defending this… This… This algal infection on the face of reality?”

“That is my job, whatever else you might think I owe you, I keep my men safe.”

“Thank-” I began, but she whipped around to glare at me, and the second word died in my throat.

“Pah,” Zanzikai thrashed the ground with his limbs, splintering the tiles where he pounded, “by the end of this mission, they will be dead. If they soak up a stray bullet meant for someone important – you know who I mean – then all the better.” He swivelled on his sharp legs, making sure to kick as many loose pieces of ground towards me as possible. Now that the threat of imminent death had passed, he came across more as an angry infant with a thesaurus than a vengeful sword of justice.

Dagger looked at me, unreadable in expression.

“Come on,” she said, and addressed everyone else, separately, “come on. Day doesn’t end ‘till I tell the sun to set.”

As we set off once again, at a brisker pace than before, things were clearly different this time. The others looked at me, stared at me, ogled me, and didn’t even try to hide it. I’d bet everything I owned that they hadn’t known of the ‘true Arkolt’ or our nature, and that they wouldn’t have reacted so strongly if I’d told them myself. It was Zanzikai’s reaction alone, as the most knowledgeable of us all, that had tainted their perceptions with the hard cold truth. Only Konzor stuck by my side, simultaneously snarling and scowling at anyone galncing my way.

“Scoundrels,” he spat, “after you saved our skin. We’d be dead without you, Greenie, and they’re treating you like-”

“Like I deserve,” I interrupted, probably ruder than necessary, “I saved you from my own invention.”

“You don’t really believe that nonsense, do you?”

“I remember turning it on,” I looked right into Konzor’s dual-mouthed face, “I remember almost nothing of my life, but I’ve never been able to forget that. I remember turning a little bit of it on, just to test. How proud I felt, all throughout a billion brains. I don’t know how I remember a billion brains of pride, I just do. And then the confusion, the fear, so much fear, and then the shame…”

I punched at the Arkolt intruder as it suddenly grabbed at me, two strong arms wrapping around my chest, squeezing tightly. But it wasn’t an Arkolt, I realised as my over-tuned fight-or-flight instincts faded.

“Greenie,” Konzor whispered, his hug strong enough to crack lead, “you’re the same person I met on the Ultimatum of Infinity. The same person who saved all our lives. That thing was about to kill you and you didn’t even run until it was dead.”

“That’s just instinct,” I shrugged, “running isn’t in my nature. If one body dies, it’s the same as if you lost a single neurone in your brain. That’s how it used to be.”

“Doesn’t change a thing. You saved our lives, knowing you were about to lose yours. Doesn’t matter if we were part of your hive or not, you saved all of us. They’ll remember it, and if they don’t then screw ‘em. Screw them all, the ungrateful bastards.”

“Thank you,” I nodded, “thank you. That’s kind to say.”

“What was it like?” Konzor asked, “being a hivemind? Back when there were more of you?”

“I don’t remember. I barely remember any of it,” I strained my mind, forehead crumpling, “it was like watching events through a million screens at once. It was like having a billion arms, and the mental power to control them all, as easy as you’re controlling your limbs now. A lot of it was just instinct, like walking.” I shrugged, “it was lonely. I didn’t understand how lonely it was.”

“If you had a child, would that child also be you?”

“Yes. But I’m not doing that, never again.”

“Whyever not? You could bring back your entire race!”

“For another few thousand years? That wouldn’t be very much, even if I wanted to live. But there’s no point anymore. You all know who I am now. I could never live any kind of normal life. Besides, I’ve never done anything except hurt people. I have no value. Negative value, in fact.”

“So, you’ll just let yourself die?” Konzor scoffed, “that’s ridiculous. It won’t change what you’ve done.”

“It’ll stop me making the same mistakes again.”

“That,” he said, without missing a beat, “is the most cowardly thing I have heard in my life.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re letting yourself die because you don’t want to face the hard part. The part where you change, and wake up every day deciding to stay changed. You want to sidestep the actual repentance. You want to run from the biggest fight a warrior can face.”

“Maybe I do.”

“Maybe you don’t.”

Dagger coughed from the front of the squad.

“Uh,” she pointed towards an Arkolt intruder standing at the other side of a corridor. It wasn’t charging us but wasn’t patrolling either. Instead, it was shuddering slightly, legs tapping the ground like the pencil of an impatient writer.

“Ah,” Zanzikai scratched his head, “looks like my influence is waring off. Expected it to happen of course. Not so soon.”

“How long can we expect?”

“Another few minutes.”

“How long ‘till we reach your ship?”

“Another few minutes.”

“Pick up the pace!” Dagger called out, promptly following her own advice. Wherever I looked, the Arkolt parts of the lab complex were starting to glitch and stammer, the tiny spybots twitching like dying insects where they lay. I could already feel the agony of little legs carving at my flesh just looking at them.

“Greenie,” Dagger said, working her way back through the group without slowing down, “a word please.”

“Commander,” I acknowledged, breaking away from Konzor for a moment. I wasn’t going to give her another reason to hate me by breaking discipline now.

She sighed, a proper sigh of exasperation, exhaustion, and perplexity.

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“You built the Arkolt,” she said. It wasn’t a question, not anymore. I tried to see things through her eyes, the woman who’d only ever lived under a single dying sun, who’d feared the Arkolt her entire life. I was the one who’d constructed her nightmares. I was the one who’d killed everyone on this planet. I was a harbringer of genocide, an architect of apocalypse. I was the shadow of death haunting her brain.

“Yes,” I said.

She sighed again.

“Of all the ships in the entire fleet, you had to end up on mine.”

“It wasn’t a picnic for me either,” I said without thinking. Dagger glared at me, trying to hold something back. It turned out to be laughter.

“Greenie,” she managed, but kept laughing, laughing, laughing. Everyone stared, glared at me like I might be controlling her mind, but she kept laughing, a solid ten seconds. “God,” she eventually managed, “I think I get it now. The laughing, I mean. What else am I even meant to do? What am I meant to do with you?”

“Whatever you want,” I said, “I don’t care anymore.”

“Bad attitude for a soldier.”

“I’m not a soldier. Not really. I’m a mechanic, always was. An engineer.”

“Just a better one then any of us could really have expected.”

“Not as good as I used to be.”

“Shame. It’d be good if you could just build us an anti-Arkolt virus.”

“I spent thousands of years trying that one. Didn’t work.”

“You’re a weirdo, Greenie. You know that?”

“Of course I do.”

“I don’t know what to think when I look at you. They don’t teach us to play nice with intergalactic hiveminds in primary school. But you did save our lives today. That counts for a lot in my book.”

“It doesn’t make up for this planet.”

“I’ve been thinking, just now. I can’t blame you for that. Don’t get me wrong, making the Arkolt was stupid… Jeez, I can’t believe I’m reprimanding an immortal hive mind about the ethics of artificial intelligence. Making the Arkolt was stupid, but you aren’t responsible for anything it’s done since. It’s irrational to blame someone for all that, it has to be. Who invented the gun, right? The bomb? I don’t know their names. I only know yours because you’re right in front of me, and because fat-hands over there gave it to you right in front of me – Look out!”

She pushed me aside as an Arkolt intruder slammed against her chest, legs still jittery but coordinated enough to attack. Dagger sprawled across the ground, gun clattering from her grip. The intruder glared at her with its laser emitter, which glowed purple with heat, but didn’t seem capable of firing yet.

“Come on!” Zanzikai’s four legs and four arms started to gallop away from us as fast as eight limbs could carry him, “they’re waking up! We’re almost there!”

“What about the Commander?” Konzor screamed after him.

“Already dead. Come on! I’m not waiting for you!”

“Coward!” Konzor spat against the visor of his helmet, and dived towards the intruder. At full capacity it would’ve ripped Konzor from its body easier than pulling off a bandage, but for now it seemed fully focussed on staring into Dagger’s face with its glowing weapon, just waiting for it to start working again. The other soldiers stumbled for a moment, torn between their objective and their commander.

“Go,” Dagger croaked through winded lungs, “just, just,” she coughed, a dribble of blood falling from the side of her mouth, “just go!”

That was enough for the others, who fled after Zanzikai as he scurried through the complex.

It made sense. It was the objective. A few could be sacrificed for the greater whole.

I raised my gun and started firing into the intruder, careful to avoid Konzor as he tore at it with his hands.

“Any tech magic you got for us, Greenie?” Konzor grunted, still failing to find an exploitable fault-point in the casing.

“Guns are technology,” I kept firing, refusing to look away as the laser-eye grew brighter. Tiny chips fell away, but nothing substantial.

“On point,” Konzor signalled towards a chipped part of the intruder’s body. In response I concentrated my fire, slowly drilling my way through the sphere. “Now stop,” he poked two tips of his claws through the opening and pulled so hard his skin turned almost white with sheer effort. A fault-line appeared, and then a crack, and then with an effort only believable in fairytails, an entire segment of the casing snapped off. I fired once more, at almost point-blank range, hitting the computer parts squarely until the intruder fell dead.

“Are you brain dead?” Dagger asked faintly, closing her eyes in barely hidden relief. Konzor let out a single note of barking laughter.

“Must be!” He slapped my back with his claw, “we killed that thing, you and I, two men verses the Arkolt!”

“You pulled it apart with your bare hands.”

“Only because you shot it! Now that’s teamwork, right there.”

“It was already broken, you idiots.”

“Still counts.”

“I’m broken too,” she hacked up a mouthful of blood and phlegm while a plume of air leaked from cracks in her helmet. “It hurts when I try to walk.”

“I think you’ve punctured a lung,” I winced, “bad internal bleeding. Try to keep calm.”

“Those two sentences are mutually exclusive, Greenie. You two should go.”

“Oh, we will,” Konzor said, and before I could stop him, he’d flung Dagger over his back like a rucksack, knocking another load of blood from her bleeding lungs. “Because now we have everything.”

“Right,” I nodded, and together we set off along Zanzikai’s path at a sustainable sprint. It was mostly guess-work, but every so often we’d see a scrape in the ground where the professor had tread or squashed Arkolt spybugs, and the trail turned hot again.

“Oh lord,” Konzor mimicked my sentiment when we saw three soldiers lying face-down in a pool of blood and ash, the walls and floor charred by an Arkolt beam, “they’re useless without you, Commander. That scientist can spill chemicals together, but he can’t lead men.”

“Rat-bastard,” she managed, and we were running again before the unseen murderer could beat us to the punch.

“Do you really think they can do what he said?” I asked, panting for breath.

“A portal to another universe?” Konzor asked. I nodded. “I don’t know. It’s almost too good to be true.”

“But the Arkolt have it.”

“Too bad to be true.”

“You think there’s a set limit for ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ before a thing can be true?”

“Before today I’d have probably said yes.”

Ahead of us we heard a commotion, capitalised by a big crashing sound, which energised us to bolt down the final stretch of corridor and through the entrance of a wide-open hanger. It had clearly once been an Enfirnian construction, with dilapidated fighters and shuttles still parked at the edges and corners. Dominating the space was a single oblong Arkolt transport ship, bigger than the Ultimatum of Infinity by far. It hovered just off the ground, with a man-made utility ladder resting against the hull, reaching up to the open cargo-hold.

Just below it, a cluster of the remaining soldiers formed a horseshoe around the base so the others could shimmy up to the hold. Ahead of them, six Arkolt intruders fired their beams in short blasts, still not quite able to concentrate it for long. Even with the enemy in a state of disarray, it was clear not everyone would make it to the top.

Without hesitation, Konzor opened fire on the nearest robot, which swivelled on the spot to attack us. Thankfully this gave the others a little leeway, their attack on the other five temporarily concentrated. I followed his example, setting my sights on one of the others. If we could help just one more soldier reach the cargo hold alive, it would be worth it.

“Greenie,” Dagger slurred, “could you get another fighter working?”

“If I could get to one,” I grunted, diving behind a support pillar when the intruder turned to face me, its beam scoring a red-hot ditch through the bricks. “I don’t think I have time.”

“For Gods’ sake!” Zanzikai called from where he stood within the cargo-hold, the first to reach safety as ever. “Are you people coming or not? Because I can’t take off with that ladder still there, and you’re all taking your sweet, sweet time.”

“We’re dying!” Someone called from below. Zanzikai let out an impatient burp.

“Clearly not, because I can still hear you whining.”

“I’m not leaving the others behind.”

“Why? The whole universe is at stake, maybe more.”

“Because they’ll die.”

“Yes?”

“Forget it, you stupid mantis,” the soldier kept firing, “just wait a few minutes.”

“No need for language like that,” Zanzikai sighed, “fine. If you want to be difficult about it,” he tiptoed to the edge of the opening and took aim with his new arms. Four separate beams fired from each, hitting the intruders square in the eye. It wasn’t as powerful as their weapons, and the intruders didn’t die instantly, but with the front of their bodies missing they were easy enough to defeat, and the final two were mown down by our guns.

“There,” Zanzikai said simply, though it was clear he was panting from effort, “are you done?”

“Done?” The soldier laughed angrily, “you bastard, you could have done that the whole time?”

“Of course. But it would have been faster – far less effort too – if you’d just followed me.”

“People died! Our commander died because you were, what, saving your effort?”

“Yes, of course. We have a God to fight, no point wating bullets on angels and demons. You forced my hand when I realised we’d save more time if I didn’t have to wait for you. Now get in the ship before I have an aneurism.”

“Make me.”

Zanzikai twitched, and all four of his Arkolt arms focussed fire on the offender.

“Get in the transport,” he said again.

“Do it,” Dagger said hoarsely, as loud as she could, “we can’t waste time.”

“Commander?” The soldier said with clear joy and bewilderment when he saw us, “I thought-”

“You could have fun without me? Of course not. Now get in the transport before I actually have an aneurism. Please.”

We quickly climbed the ladder before more robots could find us, Konzor dragging Dagger to the top like a piece of human-sized climbing equipment. Zanzikai had clearly fitted the ship for habitation, the cargo-bay now fitted with bunks, a jerry-rigged life-support system, and thankfully, a medbay.

“Everyone onboard?” Zanzikai screamed as we stripped away Dagger’s spacesuit and lay her to rest in the medbay. He was wearing a headset reminiscent of the one we’d found him in. “Actually, don’t care. Launching in three, two, now!”

The ship took off, so steady and perfect in its application of inertial dampening that we didn’t even feel the force of launch. Above us, the ceiling opened up, dropping a large helping of rocks and dirt against our nigh-indestructible ship, none of it serving to slow us as we finally ascended from the underground. We were gifted one final glimpse of Vlissik’s barren surface before the cargo-hold slid shut, sealing us within the dimly-lit gullet of an Arkolt transport ship.