Beta Station Primary Dome
Planet Irkalla, Survivor’s Refuge
4452.2.28 Interstellar
Janus, Syn, Terra, and Martial dropped down from the service gantry to the surface of the dome. Looking down through the clear plex-glass at the buildings far below, Janus felt like they were floating in the air. They were close to sixty meters up, two-thirds of the way to the top of the dome, and even with the tallest of buildings. The empty streets made Beta primary look more like an architect’s model than a real settlement.
The four of them looked unlike any duster Janus had ever seen. Once they’d decided on the decoy plan, they’d gone all in with the idea of avoiding the nanites instead of fighting them. On top of reinforcing the joints with the modified SLiP grease and baking the outside of it into a hardened shell, they’d sprayed the outside of the suits with a layer of polymerized dust, including the visors. They looked like two-legged triliths, or rock people. Or maybe cyclops. The single-camera lens in the middle of where their visors used to be was triggering an instinctive sense of unease in Janus, but since their goal was to appear inhuman, he thought they were pretty close to the mark.
“Let’s get the airlock set up,” Martial said, and Janus nodded.
They were going in under the Gracian flag, so to speak, another concession Janus had given them. He probably should have gotten something for it, but they were going to help people, so he didn’t really care. While initially haughty, the reality of the danger was sinking in, and Martial was actually deferring to him in some things. There were lessons to learn there, but Janus wasn’t sure what they were, yet.
They got the inflatable airlock rigged up and pressurized in less than ten minutes. It was a tight squeeze with four of them and the glass cutter, but they made it work.
“Cutting,” Terra said, and the diamond saw started its circular path around the breaching frame.
Mick, supported by two Gracian engineers, would be breaching the main airlock. He would be “going in loud,” as the Hunter insisted on saying multiple times. He’d even had the mechs put together a flamethrower for him, which he couldn’t wait to test out on the swarms. A second team of Betans would go in through a service entrance to confuse the swarm even further, while Janus’s team went in quietly. If they could delay the swarm’s noticing them, they should be able to make it all the way to the vault. If they couldn’t… At Janus’s insistence and under heavy protest, Lira was staying behind. At least one member of the Prime Dome team would survive this to finish the Trials.
“Janus?” Syn said on a private suit-to-suit channel.
“What is it?” he said, looking at her.
“You know how you had me send you that SYNcope program?” Syn said. “It kind of gave me a backdoor into your wrist-comm.”
“What?” Janus said, starting to stand up and then remembering the inflatable airlock was there.
“Yeah,” Syn said. “You should really be more careful with what you download.”
Janus felt angry and violated. Not only had Syn gotten access to sensitive, private information, but she could have compromised systems he depended on to survive. He squashed his temper down. They were moments from doing a difficult job and he couldn’t afford to be distracted. “Why are you telling me this?”
He could hear the nervousness in Syn’s voice. “Because we might die, and because I found that really neat VI program your parents left you—”
Forget squashing things down. Janus was about to go off.
“—I didn’t watch the recordings! Honest!” Syn said. “But I saw some of the files had been locked by someone else.”
Uncle Ivan’s recordings, Janus realized, and his anger guttered out, replaced by curiosity. “What about those files?”
Syn shrugged. It was an exaggerated gesture, because she was still getting used to how flexible the cult-tech suits were. “Do you want them unlocked?”
It wasn’t a particularly hard question for Janus. He’d known Ivan all his life and lived with him for twelve years without knowing he was a former aspirant—in charge of Prime Dome’s training program, no less! How many times over the past two weeks had he wished he could benefit from Ivan’s counsel, the way Martial could ask Murkinson for advice whenever he wanted? “Yes, I do,” he told Syn. “But I want you out of my system as soon as it’s done. No backdoors, and no ways to create new ones later if you change your mind.”
“Of course,” Syn said. “And I’m sorry. We’d just met, and you’d just landed me in a heap of trouble.”
“It’s fine,” Janus said. And it wasn’t, but he understood what it was like to be crushed by forces larger than himself and to want every edge you could get.
“Done,” she said, making a few entries. “I had everything set up. I really am sorry.”
Janus smiled, even though she couldn’t see his face. “It’s okay, Syn. I get it. I really do.” Janus checked the VI’s list of topics and saw that, true to her word, there were seven new recordings made by Uncle Ivan available to watch. He had another reason to survive this—to maybe finally understand what had happened to his home, his parents, and why his uncle had been able to get him and Callie out, but no one else.
“Beta team, in position,” the technocrat’s people said on the mission channel.
“Hunter team, in position,” Mick said,
The cutting assembly had finished its rotation, and four spade-like tips gripped the plug like a carnival crane. “Cut complete,” Terra said. “We’re ready.”
Martial looked at Janus, and Janus gave him a thumbs up.
“Gracian team, in position. All teams, breach,” Martial said.
The plug was lifted and slid to the side with barely a scrape. Martial moved into position. Terra grabbed one of the cables and clipped it to the auto-descender on Martial’s chest piece. “Survivor’s Grace, first in,” he said.
“I’ll see you on the ground,” Terra answered, thumping him on the shoulder.
With that, the Gracian aspirant took a step backward and plummeted through the hole.
“Invarian, you’re next,” Terra said. Janus stepped forward, his heart in his throat as the Gracian attached him to the cable. It was an ultrathin high-strength carbon nanotube fiber the Betans had extruded from the feedstock his team had brought with them. He hoped they were as good at fabrication as the Electronaughts seemed to think.
He’d heard the anticipation of jumping was worse than the fall, but the fall was much, much worse. For three whole seconds—an eternity—Janus was in free fall as surrounding buildings blurred by. Then the auto-descender kicked in, slowing him down at two times gravity for the last ten meters. His feet hit the ground and he ran clear, pulling the cable free from his rig and getting out of the way just as Syn hit the ground. Terra came last, and then the cable dropped to ground as the machine put the plug back in place and sealed the dome.
“We’re in,” Terra said on their team’s private channel as she coiled up the cable. They were using encrypted line-of-sight comms while Mick and the Betans broadcast in the clear. From this point on until they reached the vault or turned back, Janus’s team would be able to hear the others but not respond, lest they attract unwanted attention.
“Whenever you’re ready, Invarian,” Martial said.
Janus looked at the display Syn had cobbled together for them. It included the routes to both the factory and the vault. The factory route was overlaid on the real world in blue, and the way to the vault in green. But the diversions at the two entrances would only protect them for so long, especially when they got to the lower levels of the facility, so they’d had to come up with additional ways to mask their presence from the swarm. Part of it was what they’d done to their suits. Comm discipline, of course, and they weren’t connected to the noosphere. The swarm could also detect body heat, carbon dioxide, and other organic compounds that humans exhuded; the suits contained these, and the layer of rock dust sprayed onto them made them unlike the nanites’ preconception of a human void walker. There were also several routes to each objective, with a small chance at each step to switch to an alternate so the swarm couldn’t determine their destination. Finally, there was the puppetmaster, a four column display that showed a waterfall of arrows, one column for each limb.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Syn had, admittedly, stolen the idea from an ancient party game.
Janus stepped forward with his left foot, then forward, back, and forward with his right. He raised his left arm, dropped his right, and so on, following the prompts and the route to the vault. It took him five minutes to walk one hundred meters, but they were making progress, and there was no sign the swarm was paying attention to them.
“I feel ridiculous,” Martial said.
“Focus on moving,” Terra answered.
“I am focused on moving!” Martial said. “There’s no rhythm to this thing!”
“That’s the point,” Janus said, interrupting the Gracians. “Cut the chatter. Even directional comms can be intercepted if they pass between us.”
The puppeteer device, unlike the rhythm game it was based on, had been fed as near a random sequence as could be generated by human beings. While true randomness rarely existed outside of quantum physics, it was unlikely the swarm would recognize the jerky movements as four humans infiltrating their city, although small errors made by the team would add up to form patterns out of the noise.
That, and there was always a chance the swarm had developed enough cognition to be curious, a chilling thought that Janus quickly set aside.
After the first ten minutes, the Betan team announced they were falling back. “Beta team is out, two casualties. Good luck, Survivor’s Grace.”
“Hunter team, still going strong,” Mick said. “These things do not like fire!” The sound of gushing flames came in over the open channel for several seconds. “I’m at about half of my fuel reserves. I’ll draw as much attention as I can.”
Step, swing, step, shuffle, back, forward, and on… The more they progressed, the more it became easy to match their motions to the display. The more natural it became, Janus thought. Every minute brought them closer to detection.
“Hunter team’s out! Suit compromised! They’re all over me!”
Mick stopped transmitting. Janus hoped that meant he’d cut comms and run as they’d planned and not left it until too late. He couldn’t send a message back to ask, so he focused on the job, one step at a time. He needed to pay attention to his display alone, because the impulse to mimic the other three people in the team was strong.
“Hunter is out! Good luck, Janus!” Mick said, and Janus felt relieved.
They reached the first sublevel access point.
Terra tried the door. “It’s locked.”
“Do we blow it, or move to the next one?” Martial asked.
“Nanites?” Janus asked.
“Negligible,” Syn answered, waving a scanner in the air.
Janus made the call. “Blow it.” Better to reach their target and get clear than risk taking longer and get caught.
Terra pulled a breaching charge out of her pack, placed it on the door, and stood to the side. There was a thump and the door was blown inward, swinging loosely on two remaining hinges.
“Go!” Janus said.
There was no way to mask what they were doing during this part of the breach. They rushed to the service elevator. Terra and Martial used prybars to get the doors open, only to discover the elevator was stopped between the first sublevel and the ground floor. Janus didn’t hesitate. He climbed onto the top of the cab and pulled Syn up with him and he took a knee. “Come on!” he told Martial and Terra.
The Gracians climbed aboard and grabbed hold of what they could.
“Anytime, Syn,” Janus said, knowing the swarm would respond to their presence.
“I’m working on it… and I’m in!” Syn said, and the elevator shaft lit up with red emergency lights.
Martial looked at the Betan programmer. “Is it supposed to—”
The four mag brakes unlocked and the elevator dropped with Team Gracian on it. Janus felt his stomach rise to his throat and his balls crawl into his pelvis. Then, the mag brakes locked again, throwing sparks where they gripped the guide rails, and the elevator stopped just short of the fourth sublevel.
Meaning the team was right in front of the third sublevel doors, give or take half a meter, too low for the factory and far too high for the vault. “Can you get it going again?” Janus asked.
“No!” Syn said, undisguised fear in her voice. “The security system locked me out!”
“Into the cab!” Janus said, and he grabbed the handle on the access hatch, yanking it open. He dropped into the unlit cab, the aspirant suit’s synthetic muscles helping him absorb the impact of the extra weight, and the rest of the team quickly followed. Martial and Terra took prybars to the doors and had them partially open when an alarm went off.
“Freeze!” Syn shouted on the closed network and everyone went perfectly still.
In the mixed blood-red emergency lighting from the elevator shaft and the light coming through from the doors, a black cloud poured into the cab. The nanites were so dense they were visible to the naked eye, rolling like smoke but purposeful and predatory. The black cloud washed over Terra, flowing over and around her, before swirling around Syn. They lingered around the scanner Syn held in her hand, then they moved on, engulfing Janus in darkness.
He waited, as motionless as a statue. Syn and the technocrat had theorized that the swarm might ignore them once or twice if it was only investigating the area of a security alarm, at least until it started to correlate the four odd-looking suits with disruptions within the facility. The nanites could normally breach his suit in just under an hour, but he doubted it would take a concentration this dense anywhere near as long. He couldn’t see at all through the cloud of killer machines. Even if they wanted to run, they couldn’t exactly climb their way up the shaft with the swarm on them, and they were at least an hour from the main entrance.
Janus thought he could hear a buzzing, scratching sound. They were in his suit, he knew it. Any moment, now, he would feel the burn as they—
His vision cleared. The cloud was rising, heading up the shaft to where they’d forced the doors open moments before.
Martial turned his head toward Janus but said nothing. Even though the visible part of the swarm had moved on, the air could be full of the nanoscale machines. Janus turned toward Syn, who activated her scanner, and for a tense minute more, they waited. “We’re clear,” Syn said.
“Let’s go,” Janus told the others, and they got the doors the rest of the way open.
Using the puppeteer display, they stumbled down the hallway, lurching like zombies, and emerged into a wide commercial space.
That was where they saw the first bodies.
“Survivor’s mercy…” Terra said.
They spread out once they left the service entrance. Bodies were everywhere. The team had arrived in what had been some kind of shopping center, a series of circular levels around a central well that went down thirty levels. Betans were sprawled on the floor outside and inside the shops, leaned up against walls, or piled in front of locked doors. All of them were dead, their bodies shriveled and dry like they’d been mummified. Janus saw a person hunched in a corner, holding what had to be a child. He couldn’t tell if they’d been a man or a woman, not that it mattered. How fast did this happen? he wondered. Did all the nanites go feral at once, or did those responsible let the problem get worse and worse until it was too late?
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Martial said, putting his hands on his knees.
“Keep your helmet on,” Janus said.
“But—”
“Look, damn it!” Janus said, pointing.
A quarter-turn around the ring, another black cloud was drifting through the air like a school of fish. It wasn’t the only one. There were two more than Janus could see on this level, and more on the levels below. They circled the empty space in the center like Old Earth sharks, each at a different altitude.
“We should go back,” Martial said.
“We can still make it,” Terra said, contradicting her fellow Gracian.
“We can still make it to the factory, Invarian! Nobody benefits if we fail!” Martial said, ignoring her.
Janus had to admit, the visible swarms were something they hadn’t expected or planned for. He’d thought they would be dealing with something like a corrosive gas, omnipresent and gradual. He hadn’t expected them to have behavior and a body-like structure. “Syn, any idea why they’re behaving like that?”
“Nope,” Syn said. “Because they like it? It makes them smarter? If I or the Betans knew, we probably wouldn’t need to be here.”
“Right,” Janus said. He turned to Terra. “How far to the vault?”
“If we have to leave this complex, it’s going to take us at least half an hour, and there’s no telling if it’s better or worse along a different route.”
“You have a better option?” Janus asked.
“You’re all crazy,” Martial said.
Terra shrugged. “I’ve got sixty-two meters of cable with me. We could go over the rail.”
“Will that take us the whole way?” Janus asked.
Terra shook her head. “We’ll be four floors short, but that’s a lot closer than we are now.”
The swarm nearest them on their level was drifting in their direction. It was now or never. “Let’s do it.”
“No!” Martial said, taking a step back.
“Martial, man up,” Terra snapped.
The Gracian aspirant waved his arm. “I’m not getting killed to satisfy your pride, Invarian!”
The motion was thoughtless and unmistakably human.
“Look out!” Syn said.
Janus froze as three swarms halted their lazy drift and angled toward them at once. Martial, who must have realized he was the focus of their attention, took a step back, and the swarms sped forward, arcing toward him like black javelins.
And Martial ran.