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Work in Progress
I’m nearly one month and 8,000 words into the new novel – Rise of the Iconoclast. It’s a depature from what I normally write about, aiming for a lighter touch. I thought I’d drop in a chunk of the work to date. Unproofed – so you will find mistakes, but it’ll give you an idea of the flavour of the story.
RISE OF THE ICONOCLAST: Another Yellow Dawn novel. A bunch of ex-military troopers in full-borg conversions, now flying around in a battered aerodyne – always hungry for fuel and excitement, and the big gig that will allow them to step change their lives. Then a random encounter with a foolish man, they discover an unusual object – a shard of technology. They’re told it is part of the original casing of the Dragon Breathe AI. And they’re not the only people -or things – coming to look for it. A bit of a guns and technology romp with hopefully a light-hearted vibe to the characters.
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On top of writing this novel, I’m proofing the novel I finished last month, The Black Lake. A little over half-way through the draft MS and aiming to have it finished and ready to launch in September 2012.
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One
.
The decision to retreat wasn’t something that came easily to Izaäk Raske, even though the idea often sung through the organic channels of his mind like a chorus of self-preservation. In any conflict it was a game of numbers. And he always did the maths. His body may have been a machine but his brain was still the one he’d been born with, before a bomb-blast in Krakow left him in the hands of a corporate-sponsored surgical unit.
The large, metal-plated bulk of Hariwald was a few strides behind, the bulging carapace of his hip-joint whining like an overworked sex bot thanks to the shard of shrapnel that had ripped through it five minutes earlier. Had they really been running that long? Steinsson, wearing a slim and agile infiltration chassis, ran alongside. Behind them was a murderous mob of gelweed technicians, no better than redneck farmers, hell-bent on reclaiming what Raske and his crew had stolen.
A spray of projectiles tore up the uneven, moon-bleached earth around his feet. The technicians must have hit a rise in the arid, dusty landscape behind them. Then the rapid – dink – dink – dink – as a stream of the home-made bullets struck him. Raske didn’t know where yet. He heard the sound through the amplification patches built into his metal cowl. Nothing stopped working. No damage data appeared within the aquamarine glyphs projected over his field-of-vision by the various layers of electronics and sensors that encased his human brain. Even so, the instinctive coding of his once-flesh self, made him hunch up as he ran, trying to present a smaller target.
Steinsson must have caught a few rounds too because he suddenly whooped, punching the air with a metal fist extending from a limb of modular carbo-plastic segmented armour. The excited voice was modulated with a weird electronic squeal, one of Steinsson’s quirks of personality; the half-mad bastard had embraced the borg-life with the zeal of a drag-queen running into a dress shop.
Raske didn’t share the enthusiasm for a metal existence or excitement for the current engagement. The technicians might have been steadily falling behind but he knew, from the state of Hariwald’s shrapnel damage, that they were carrying dangerous ordinance. It would just take something to punch through the armour plating at the back of his skull; something heavy with a white-phosphorous coating or depleted uranium core, or a plasma bolt fired from an industrial cutter – and it would be goodnight señorita. His brain was all he had left. Those technicians were bristling with modern equipment: it was the reason Raske had chosen to rob them in the first place.
He clutched the booty to his – once polished, now badly scuffed – chest-plate. The booty was a rugged-looking briefcase, the kind once used by couriers before the world turned to shit; black carbon-wrap emblazoned with subtle bio-hazard logos.
More projectiles. Steinsson whooped again and roared a taunt at their pursuers for them to try harder. Steinsson could have easily opened up a significant lead between himself and them but chose not to. Loyalty or insanity, Raske never knew which. It was always the same, and had been for the few months Raske had known him; some kind of deep space colonial marine mission that went awry and left Steinsson drifting alone, and without a cryo-pod, for a very long time.
“Who said this place was a walk in the park?” Hariwald’s very human-coded voice washed up from behind. It wasn’t a question, it was an accusation.
“Quit griping old man,” Steinsson warbled back over his shoulder, layering the modulation with a sing-song piss-take.
It was a fair point, Raske conceded silently; irritation directed towards Steinsson. The deranged recon-trooper (and pilot) had completed a recce and utterly failed to either spot – or report – the fact the gelweed farm was protected by Nanomech. In this case, insect-like sentry systems that held trigger codes for home-made claymores positioned around the main lab. Hariwald had been spotted during extraction and – bang.
Hariwald’s voice buzzed and squelched with electronic equivalent of rage, as his EMU (emotional replication unit) struggled to cope with the surge of juice from his brain. “I never told you my age boy. And you’re deluded if you think your youth makes you any better than me.”
These two constantly grated nerves together. One consequence of a crew confined to living in each other’s space, jaded comfort against a world now mostly hostile to machines; especially, upright walking, bipedal ones. Most fleshy humans didn’t stop to consider there might be an organic brain inside. Cold hostility, shouted abuse, or bullets, was a common reaction from survivors when people like Raske and his crew showed up. They didn’t consider that Izaäk Raske, Hariwald Hlavač, Tristão Steinsson, plus Nikias Solberg and Malthe Herriot, back at the ship, had been born from the wombs of human mothers, and with machine-bodies or otherwise, had all gone through the genetic game of chance and survival against the pathogens that had ravaged the planet ten years ago. Malthe – their engineer – had endured a particularly terrible flavour of intolerance.
Ironically, the only humans who seemed to actually care about this were FABIAN militants, a brotherhood of self-proclaimed “machine killers” who saw it as their duty to protect the evolutionary supremacy of flesh and blood over metal. Cyborgs – the essence of a human being encased in a machine through choice or organic survival – were not considered a threat to this supremacy. Robots, and any other automated device, were.
Of course, raiding isolated communities and robbing tech sites did nothing to endear fleshy folks to them, Raske realised. But needs must, and his needs and that of his crew, and his ship – The Ginny – were great.
Raske and the others, they were victims just like the rest of them. All of them had lost family and friends during the apocalyptic event known as Yellow Dawn. All of them had gone through the hell of adjusting to a world now reduced to a handful of Living Cities with small settlements, clinging onto dust and despair, spread out across a new wilderness in between. Only the orbital colonies and deep space habitats powered on, almost unaffected – but reaching those was a gong-pipe dream for the average Joe.
Abruptly, a steep decline opened up in front of them; they ploughed down and off the undulating terrain of dirt and rock, onto the cracked and weed-riddled surface of a main road. Feet clacking on cold tarmac. Raske scanned for bearings. Navigation markers flashed up in his peripheral vision, ghostly green and luminous – waypoint beacons broadcast by the beads he’d dropped on their approach to the target. The road was the final marker – following it south would lead directly to the abandoned villa, nestled in the foothills of a mountain; tucked away behind the villa was the Ginny, where Nikias and Malthe would be waiting.
It was a good feeling; knowing those two would be there. Raske had squirted an SOS ahead of him: Coming in hot. Hostiles on heels. Be ready immediate evac. He just prayed they were frosty and that the Ginny was behaving – a few mechanical issues with engineering had left the ship a little bit unreliable lately.
The group picked up speed. Hopefully they would create a clean gap between their pursuers with enough room for them to board the Ginny and get away. Frustratingly, Hariwald’s damaged hip joint now squealed like a demented see-saw. The gelweed farmers could probably track them through the blackness of Interstellar space following a racket like that.
* * *
They covered nearly a mile before Hariwald’s hip finally seized-up. The bulbous, large-framed chassis suddenly toppled forward and crashed down onto the badly weathered road surface. There was a roar of furious cursing, infused with a quavering electronic whistle. Raske and Steinsson stopped and turned. Hariwald rolled over onto his side, large box-like arms flailing as he struggled to overcome the inertia of his physical mass, one massive leg refusing to comply to commands.
Raske dialled-up his night-vision and peered along the barrel of the road. The coast was off to their left; low hills to the right, with the road veering off towards them several hundred metres away. No sign of the rabble yet.
Hariwald began verbalising damage-report data spilling into his awareness: either a main hydraulic line had snapped, ran dry or clogged with dust getting into the internal mechanisms, or the chunk of shrapnel had locked-up the moving parts.
“Won’t know until Malthe takes a look,” Hariwald concluded, voice laced with consternation. He managed to sit upright, looking like a pile of moving boulders and boxes in the digitally filtered moonlight.
Raske nodded his head. Audio was starting to bleed into his long-range sensors. They didn’t have long. “Can you get up Doc?”
“Negative.”
Steinsson piped up, unable to help himself – Raske guessed: “I bet you were old when they stuck you in that can.”
“Not helpful,” Raske stated. He rushed over to Hariwald; Steinsson fell in silently alongside. The recon-trooper might have been a monkey wrench short of a toolkit but he was strangely quick to acknowledge when he’d crossed the invisible line of command.
They both got Hariwald to his feet and then had to strain their physical capacity to start dragging the blocky chassis along the road, whilst maintaining enough speed to keep them ahead of the approaching mob. Raske guesstimated the gelweed technicians were only five hundred or so metres behind them now. It didn’t help that Steinsson wasn’t built for strength: stealth and agility was not the combination they needed right now.
“Come on you skinny pup,” Hariwald jibed.
“I’d like to see you make it back hoping on one leg.”
“Shut it. Both of you.” Raske told them. He slammed the courier-case against Hariwald’s plastron; the other borg instinctively grabbed at it and held it there against his chest.
The landscape up ahead looked alien and unfamiliar in the modified moonlight, but the navigation markings in his vision told him they were less than a mile from dust-off.
It was heavy going. Literally. Raske was gritting his proverbial teeth at the persistent warnings, popping up as overlays within his field of vision, telling him that he was exceeding safety limits for the chassis carrying capacity. It would be just his luck for the central power-to-motor distribution hub to go pop right now, leaving his limbs dangling like spaghetti from a spoon. Steinsson was helping but he could have done with Nikias being there.
Steinsson’s infiltration chassis was a Fujiborg. Beneath the modular segments was a lightweight skeleton of carbon-fibre with a thin steel core; the bare minimum of synmov gave the chassis speed to run and strength to climb and carry weapons, but it wouldn’t be much good in a panzerfaust fight. Raske often said there was more air than substance to Steinsson – and he meant that in more ways than one. There was no abdomen to speak of, just a lot of empty space beneath the power-driving thorax – but even that was expendable, with reduced armour plating to keep the weight down and agility high. The critical area of protection was the head. Not just because it contained Steinsson’s brain – although Raske sometimes wondered if an entire brain had been transplanted when Steinsson volunteered for full-borg conversion – but because it also housed the Denz-memory units.
The Denz-memory units soaked up all of the feeds from advanced sensory systems wired into the skull. Steinsson could review playback via his synaptic bridge or switch into real-time review mode (R-TRIM), experiencing vastly enhanced audio, visual, olfactory senses, and a suite of other filters that enabled him to detect and identity a range of organic and non-organic features within a wide arc of awareness. However, Steinsson often complained that employing R-TRIM was like trying to ride a tornado: so usually ignored the feature.
Which is probably what he did during the supposed recce, Raske surmised.
After what seemed to be an interminable period of strained, struggling progress, Raske recognised the vast, irregular mound of darkness rising up to his left, blotting out the starlight. The mountain. Abruptly, they struck the fork in the road that led up to the private villa, tucked away and hidden like a gem in the night. Waypoints flashed up within his peripheral vision. He dragged Hariwald along the ascending route with a stunted running stride.
The technicians were gaining. He could hear their exhausted panting, but their angry chatter suggested weren’t going to give up. Hariwald began trying to hop but it wasn’t helping. Raske told him to stop.
Rounding a curve in the narrow road, the surrounding terrain fell away to reveal the three-story villa hunched on a wide plateau. Even in the moonlight the ravages of weather, decay and neglect were visible in the long-abandoned structure. In daylight, it would have probably enjoyed an incredible view, over some hidden ridge, of the nearby coastline and the Mediterranean Sea. A little over a decade earlier it would have had a grandstand view of the event that nearly ended the life of all humans on the planet: North Africa and the Southern Euro-Fed taking the impacts from the Callisto as it broke apart in Earth’s upper atmosphere and spilled its potent, deadly cargo.
Beside the villa, the Ginny appeared out of the darkness like the poster-icon of an old world Christmas theme. Coloured navigation lights oozed into life as the two crew members on board – Nikias and Malthe – responded to their approach. With absolute relief, Raske heard the throaty rumble of the helix propulsion motors.
The Ginny was nearly as tall as the villa. A bulky, irregular ellipsoid with half a dozen spherical structures around its circumference. The cockpit window formed the narrow nose of the ellipsoid, a latticework of alloy struts beneath a thick layer of curved, transparent carbo-plastic. The fat rear end contained a cavernous cargo hold – mostly empty – which was being revealed at this moment in a wash of deep red light as the lower section swung down to form a loading ramp.
The inky black, flesh and bone, muscle-bound figure of Malthe came trotting down the ramp carrying a long, curved and wickedly serrated sword; baggy cotton trousers, leather boots and his bare chest glistening in the red light. It wasn’t sweat. The dank, sticky moisture seeped out of the Chief Engineer’s pores almost continuously, an aspect of the affliction he suffered from. Malthe was one of the unfortunates who had survived the first pathogen, the virus that had killed nearly seventy percent of humanity in a few weeks; but as with a few hundred thousand others, he had been left changed at a molecular level. A new strain of human was formed over a few feverish, sweat-drenched days and nights. Some people called his kind “Orcs”. A term of insult. The least offensive word categorising them was The Changed.
Malthe raised the sword slightly to indicate he could see them, then nodded and took up a half-crouched position – ready to defend the ship. The Changed had remarkable sight even at night.
Behind them came the sounds of the technicians, reinvigorated and freshly angered now they had caught a definitive scent of their prey: the navigation lights of the Ginny throwing colours across the mountain terrain, sparkling in the darkness.
As Raske and Steinsson dragged Hariwald up the ramp, the squat, recurved hull of the Harrier Stormhammer came into view. The aerodyne was a Recon Assault Craft (A-RAC), and was the only significant item in the hold. It was also one of only a handful of offence hardware they carried that was actually sufficiently armed to be a threat. Weapons were cheap these days – since Yellow Dawn – but the cost of ammunition was astronomical.
Steinsson threw him a metal glance, the subtle flash of twin electric blue orbs in a heavily armoured face. Within the same gesture, the recon-trooper squirted a short query via his synaptic bridge; the message prompt flashed up in Raske’s field of vision: aerial support?
Raske stepped away, shook his head – human instinct still coded into the neural network and nervous tissue connected to the cybernetic machine. His response –a purely mental thought process converted into text and fed through his synaptic bridge was brief and blunt: Negative. They don’t deserve it.
He didn’t add the final tail of his thoughts which was: And we can’t afford it.
Even with a good price for the booty he’d stolen from the gelweed technicians, finances for the crew of the Ginny were not looking good.
“I heard gunfire,” Malthe said matter-of-factly, striding up the ramp with the sword held out by his side. His dark eyes went straight to the area of damage on Hariwald’s chassis.
“Fragmentation damage. Fix him later,” Raske responded, already moving off – heading towards a lift and steps combo that got him out of the hold. Still vocalising commands he said, “Steinsson, T-G.”
The recon-trooper span away from the limping figure of Hariwald and sprinted off towards a floor hatch that would lead him down into the tail-gun.
“No shooting until you get my order to do so, Tristão,” Raske called after him.
“I can’t shoot them?” Steinsson squealed, stopping to glare back at Raske. “What am I supposed to? Wave my guns at them in a threatening manner?”
“They didn’t do any harm to us,” Raske began but was interrupted –
“Begging your pardon, Skipper.”
It was the carefully collapsing figure of Hariwald on the floor of the hold.
“They didn’t do much harm to us,” Raske adjusted, “I don’t consider them a threat and I don’t want UTOC coming after us for nailing their corp-sponsored gig, which judging by the equipment these folks are running, this definitely is.”
Nothing more was said. Steinsson dropped down through the hatch; Malthe vanished beneath the staircase into the bowels of the engineering section. Hariwald sat where he was cradling the courier case.
Raising a hand in front of him, Raske began to engage with the ship’s control systems now presented to him through the synaptic bridge. Bright orange overlays, menu tabs, navcomp, system status glyphs with infinite granularity of detail possible if he the time or inclination to drill down into the data. The carbonised-steel joints of his fingers glittered in the blood red glare of the tactical lighting within the hold. The synaptic bridge understood his finger gestures and brought the ship controls out of visual mode into augmented interaction. As his legs began to carry him up the staircase leading from the hold towards the Ginny’s central passage, his hand brought him into a virtual captain’s suite.
> Vertical thrust
> Hover-park mode {stage 3}
[!] Proj Alt Confirm 300 metres / ascent arc 20 seconds [OK]
> Execute
Nikias was up there in the cockpit but Nikias wasn’t the captain, and Nikias didn’t fly the ship. They might have been Raske’s crew but trust only went so far; it didn’t stretch to handing anybody the key codes to the Ginny.
Everything shifted as the Ginny’s motors kicked in and began pushing the ship away from the landing zone. Then came a shudder; Raske dropped his hand to brace himself against a wall as a flux in the power-to-lift ratio caused the whole ship to tilt and slide sideways.
Bloody engines.
He was going to have to listen to Malthe’s protestations about the number of temporary band-aid fixes being layered onto critical systems. He’d been warned enough times. This would be a terrible moment for those warnings to be realised.
Raske found a support handle to cling onto as the Ginny began to rotate with the shifting thrust from struggling motors.
Shit.
How close were they to the villa?
The glowing orange architecture of the control suite still floated over his vision. He raised his free hand and swiped rapidly through passive tabs. Reached a status screen with a sickening amount of warning prompts blinking into view and stacking up on top of each other. He opened up a communication channel through the ship’s audio-rig:
“Malthe.”
“Aye skipper, I’m working on the prob right now.”
His grip on the support handle, bolted to the internal bulkhead, was firm. He knew how to fly this ship in freefall if the need ever arose. But that wasn’t the issue right now. Raske scanned dashboard stats, their altitude was dropping, incrementally but persistently, back towards the ground. He brought up another overlay, a hybrid of visual and motion tracking scans. Two dozen humanoid figures sprinting up the fork on the road, pushing through physical exhaustion, carrying a variety of solid cold shapes – some long barrelled weapons.
Sound of squealing metal -
A brutal, rivet popping impact; Raske’s arm was nearly wrenched from its steel and graphene moorings.
What the -
Was that the villa?
As if in answer to his internal query, Steinsson’s voice flooded the ship’s audio-channel – throbbing with modulated irritation, “Man! I’ve just had a personal tour of the roof of the house. Can somebody actually fly this thing?”
Raske tuned out the sarcasm: “Malthe?”
The Changed responded instantly, blunt anger raising his voice: “I’m working on it. Maybe if you let me actually fix- oh! – OK- okay we’re there!”
Abrupt cessation of hull vibrations and a feeling of being pressed down as Ginny began to lift again.
“Incoming!” Steinsson’s voice.
Raske pushed himself upright but held onto the support handle. Decision: check engine status or review the external threat? “Can they hurt us?”
“Not sure what they are.” Steinsson responded wildly.
“Eh?” Raske queried.
Then Nikias came through on the ship’s audio-com; his voice, for all that it was synthetic and generated by a machine-chassis similar to the rest of them – if not outrageously more advanced – projected an unusually organic quality. Wet interchanges between vowels and throat cracking consonants, and as typical, phlegmatic, brimming with bored emotions. “Twenty three assailants equipped with a variety of slug-throwers. Nothing above a 7.26 mil, but that’s not what we’ve got to worry about. They just launched five drones.”
“Type?” Raske queried, his hand moving through the augmented interface floating within his field of vision. He brought up the ship’s weapon systems inventory – it had been a long time since anybody had thrown autonomous tech against him.
“Scanning.” Nikias responded.
“Malthe – how’s your patch holding up?” Raske queried.
“It’s holding. For now.” Malthe replied, his gruff voice infused with doom.
Nothing appeared in the inventory that seemed to be of any use.
Great.
Nikias, calm and lord-like: “They’re farm bots.”
Raske began to relax – the edge of a chuckle easing through the transformation from organic impulse to electronic sound.
Nikias: “They’re coming right for the motor intakes.”
Raske spoke quickly, “Can you shoot them Tristão?”
“Oh now you want me to shoot?” Steinsson howled.
“Jesus Christ can you shoot them or no?”
“No.”
“Why not goddamnit?”
“Too small.” Steinsson said succinctly.
Raske visualised the mentally held image of his once-flesh self wrinkle facial features and hunch up with a sense of imminent trouble. Malthe filled in the blanks, “They might be carrying molecular acid.”
“What the hell for?” Raske asked without really thinking for an answer.
“Breaking up the by-products after gelweed extraction and -”
“OK. I get the picture,” Raske snapped. The pervasive gentleness of the hull vibrating as the Ginny continued to rise was a nauseating prelude to disaster. If they drones gone into the internal workings – already strained and patched-up beyond bearable tolerances.
It could be a sudden and very bumpy descent.
Dashboard stats showed the Ginny at 200 metres and climbing. Those drones, if they were fully fuelled and in proper working order would probably out-fly the ship.
He let go of the support handle and pushed himself along the central corridor, momentum building into a short sprint, heading towards the cockpit – every human nerve ending clenched around its synthetic conducer counterpart; his brain quivering like jelly in a can, waiting to for the warning prompts to start burning across his vision like an inferno of bad colours.
His chassis was a Riken Alpha-CYB3 – classic heavy infantry model with modifications to cope with orbital-drop insertions; thermal shielding and enhanced concussion suppression for vital organics. He might survive a catastrophic failure in the Helix propulsion system but then again, he might not. It didn’t matter how much titanium alloy armour plating and G-shock gel wrapped his graphene and synmov workings, if the ship’s power plant detonated on impact or any of the exotic munitions went off, it was going to be over in an instant.
Or worse… shattered, semi-functioning, incapable of self-repair, he might find himself lying crippled within a firestorm, a brain baking in an oven.
Or seriously worse… locked in a metal box of digital darkness, no sensory input, no awareness other than his own mental voice bouncing off infinite walls of silence. Madness.
Steinsson babbled a torrent of abuse as he saw the drones swarming up past the tail gun. Apparently they were small, zippy things; small enough to drop down onto the intakes and release a nasty surprise.
Fear chased him down the last of the corridor like a shadow of his human self.
Inside the cramped, gloomily lit cockpit there was room for two pilots and an observer. There was no sign of Nikias.
Beyond the curving blister of the canopy he saw a moonlit scene of dry, dusty, mountainous terrain – a starlit night stretching out to the horizon. A hint of the Mediterranean off to the starboard side.
“Nikias!” He shouted.
“Oh hello.” Nikias replied, sounding as if he was very close.
“Where the hell are you?”
“Inside the avionics pod.” Raske swirled round and looked down at the floor hatch behind the observer rack. A blue-black glow broken by the staccato flicker of an electrical component shorting out. Nikias answered the question before he had a chance to ask. “I’ve discovered the drones are being manually flown.”
Son-of-a…
The revelation spilled across him like a sunrise.
“I have the com-con freq,” Nikias finished. “And… there.”
Every console in the cockpit flickered. A flurry of static hissed through his sensory feeds. His brain tingled as near-overload hit the capacitors.
Steinsson was wailing.
What’s happening?
Steinsson’s wails turned to whoops. Raske listened to the narrative whilst his brain recovered: the drones were tumbling out of the sky.
Warning lamps erupted across several consoles. A klaxon began screaming.
“I might have overdone that,” Nikias admitted gingerly.
“Can we still fly?” Raske flung himself into the pilot rack.
Malthe and Nikias both reported that the Helix motors were still working.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
Two
.
Olympus Mons free port was, to some, a strange place to have a port. Nestled away in the heavily forested peaks of Troodos Mountains, in the heart of the island nation of Cyprus, far from the threatening coastline. Access was by air, or by a solitary road that wove along the edges of vertiginous drops and through tight passes; patrolled by teams who ensured there was little in the way of robbery or Infection. No larger than a village, with only three hundred permanent residents, it was built around the scavenged remains of the hill resort Pano Plátres. Structures were a mixture of ancient stone, reclaimed wood and more modern materials; solar and hydro-electric generators augmented a small nuclear reactor that had been repurposed from the nearby abandoned military base. It was a prosperous, self-sufficient place, serviced by farms, forges and high-tech fabrication plants. The large number of flat, fertile fields were hidden between the folds of steep mountains, accessed by narrow winding dirt tracks. The handful of smaller mountain trails, that connected the village to the main road, had been intentionally blocked off to enforce a bottle-neck approach for visitors and would-be invaders. Despite its wealth, the local roads that zigzagged through the near vertical terrain were badly maintained; part of its appeal for many of the residents who were not into ostentatious displays of wealth. It was a hard working place for hard working people.
It was why Raske had flown there after the encounter with the gelweed farm. Not just as a reliable haven to sell what he had stolen, but as a place to put out word: the Ginny and its crew were for hire.
The free port was where deals got made and deal-breakers got found out. Not so much honour amongst thieves as a very reliable network of informants, managed by the core “families”: survivors originally from the area, who allegedly reclaimed the place after killing all the Infected there. The absence of Infected in the region was certainly one of the appeals of the place; but people didn’t stop here if they didn’t belong, through introductions or otherwise. You certainly didn’t come if you couldn’t pay your bills. The courier case Raske had stolen from the gelweed farm, loaded with unregistered inception-vials, was paying for those right now. They had arrived in the Ginny nearly two weeks ago. There had even been enough cash left over to buy parts for a couple of the bigger fixes Malthe needed to make to the Ginny’s engines. However, as usual, there wasn’t enough to give the crew a break. Raske and the others were living hand-to-mouth, with cheap nutrient packs that provided little in the way of flavour or satisfaction. When they weren’t working hauling cargo or providing protection on the road into and out of Olympus Mons, downtime was typically spent on the ship, brains plugged into a virt of one description or another: out-of-machine-body experiences, that gave everyone escape from the daily grind, and a chance to roam around in flesh again, even if it was within a virtual construct.
However, lately the ship’s stock of glossy sim-stim campaigns were starting to lose their appeal through over-use and familiarity. Six months ago, Raske had bought a bunch of them off a shell-trader in New Tokyo cyberspace – grabbing what he thought was a real bargain – whilst riding a hijacked satellite feed, looping through the Net from the Living City of Dubai where they had been working an escort gig. The bargain turned out to be mostly a load of badly made romance titles, thinly veiled as erotic adventures. There were three exceptions, the only sim-stims worth using: Pleasure by the Beach; Bloodshed in Baghdad (21st Century Mercenaries); and One Thousand and One Medieval Mazes, Puzzles and Games - although the ship’s data log showed that Tristão Steinsson spent a lot of time inside of The Cream Citadel of Tashkent. A soft porn, dungeon crawl adventure, where failure always led to the same “torture chamber”: stockings and silk replaced iron spikes and burning pokers. It wasn’t Raske’s thing – give him a blood curdling battle with flesh and blades any day; plus he wasn’t sure what it said about the recon trooper: an underlying gentleness of character behind the armour and bravado? Malthe didn’t use them at all: confining his interests to the Ginny’s mechanical and electronic systems; a sort of personal obsession that Raske was quietly grateful about. Especially at this moment, as he walked around outside the Ginny inspecting the external fuselage and the excellent job Malthe had done at making repairs following the collision with the villa.
Once again, like every other place they stopped at, Raske noted that Malthe didn’t spend much time in the free port’s populated areas, despite the fact that in Olympus Mons nobody really cared if you were man or machine – his mutated appearance as a Changed could often leave a ripple of revulsion in the faces of people he passed. Malthe said he’d gotten used to it – and simply preferred to avoid the potential risk of a scene – but Raske had to wonder how much it hurt, to be so abused and little understood; to be made such an outcast. Raske felt he could empathise with the concepts of intolerance and rejection, being a man inside of a machine, but he’d had intensive counselling from military psych-ops. He’d been given a soft landing. Malthe – and all the victims like him – hadn’t had that luxury; they’d fallen ill with the 1st Pathogen, in the immediate aftermath of the event everyone called Yellow Dawn, he’d gone into a coma, but instead of dying like 70% of the global population, he’d gone through a sweat-soaked fever then woken up…
Changed.
Raske trudged around the starboard side, metal feet sinking into the dry dusty soil around the landing area. There had been no damage to the fuselage here. The bulging structure of a thruster-pod stuck out, the composite materials reflecting the setting sunlight with an iridescent gleam. It wasn’t a beautiful ship, but Raske had always held functionality above aesthetics – hence why he didn’t mind the somewhat brutal cast of his chassis. Like the organic blob that had taken to the voids, air ducts and floor traps – one of Nikias’ weird synthetic biology experiments that had escaped – the ship was all curves, pitted with impact marks; solid and surprisingly big for something of its type. In the case of the Ginny, an old military FOP resupply vessel, heavy armour made up for the lack of speed; it carried enough weapons to clear an LZ but nothing that made getting into a ship-on-ship engagement a good idea.
The landing area was situated to the west of the village. Part-way around a broad, bulbous dome of exposed rock that stuck out from the surrounding forest like the bald crown of a buried giant. A long, narrow dirt track connected the grassy landing area to the village on the far side, down below. The track wove plunged into the dense trees and vanished out of sight, lost in the shadows there. The sun was still up, just. It would be dark in less than an hour. Almost all lights here were kept off unless craft were coming in or departing. That didn’t really affect Raske and the others who were all capable of seeing clearly in starlight. Otherwise, the only permanent illumination at night came from a string of sodalum posts, laid out along the edge of the dirt track, wrapped in a brown semi-transparent hydrogel, dulling the normally soft white glare of the sodalum down to tarnished yellow. Raske liked that. It made the place look old-world, medieval cluttered with a mixed bag of technology.
Reaching the nose of the ship, Raske peered up at the cockpit window, the latticework of alloy struts reminding him, as it often did, of something that belonged to a much earlier century. His electronically rendered gaze drifted down to the large pod slung beneath; Nikias’ trick with the avionics had worked against the drones, but it had also caused significant damage to some of the ship’s un-shielded electronics. Another consequence of half-completed repairs and band-aid mentality to everything that needed fixing. The Ginny would probably end up cracking apart during some high-altitude manoeuvre before she was properly patched up; the ship needed a month in a dry-dock.
One day, fella, Raske told himself and reached up a hand to touch the underbelly like a diver touching the flank of a whale. His servo-driven fingers flexed silently as he stroked, glinting with reflected light of the sunset. Looking after the ship was one of his biggest desires, just below the top of the list: getting a new organic body.
His attention focussed on the construction of his hand. The coarse sensory pads across the palm, and dotting each fingertip, that connected his brain to the external world through metres of cabling and 180 KG of chassis.
An organic body. Raske’s mind drifted with the idea.
A customised Carbon-88; something ex-military, black-ops, infiltration spec, good-looking and physically capable without the appearance of a brainless chunk of muscle. It was a big day-dream but something that never really left his thoughts. He had gotten used to existing through a machine but the idea of flesh, of an organic connection to the world was a privilege he’d been born with.
Not cheap. And not easy. A vat-grown body was a few million credits alone – never mind the kind of customised model he was thinking of. The cerebral codex – the piece of insanely advanced technological hardware that stored a digitised mind-state and connected it to the organic vessel – was another crate of money. Then the expensive process of black-balling his brain, to digitise his existence into a cerebral codex, and surgically implanting it within an “empty” Carbon could only be done by an AI – and that meant dealing directly with Borgendrill Corporation: origin of the Enigma, the source of the singularity that spawned a raft of new consciousness within automated, self-repairing, self-replicating machine colonies. Dealing with Borgendrill Corporation wasn’t a problem. They had an office in every Living City on Earth, and every orbital colony above it. It was just getting to an AI with the hardware required to complete a black-balling procedure: and that meant a journey into Deep Space. Not cheap. Not easy.
Raske grimaced – not that you could tell, physically. His internal self-image of what he actually looked like – once looked like – coiled up from the floor of his thoughts like a snake ready to bite. Always this self-fulfilling circle of doom and gloom. The idea set in permacrete that he would fail before he even tried to succeed. Where did that come from, he wondered? Not his mother – she had been optimism incarnate. And his father had been a pragmatist – level-headed and successful in business. Maybe a gene-skip from some distant generation?
No, this was who he was and he had learned to cope with the reality of it. Lowering his hand from the Ginny’s belly, Raske let the weight of his arm swing down. Then he turned and began to walk beneath the portside, towards the rear.
He didn’t have a face, as such; just two rectangular lozenges with aggressively curved corners, sensory pods, placed roughly where his eyes would have been; below this was a bulbous triangular shaped device, looking something similar to a respirator mask, which wasn’t far from the truth – part of the complex machinery that kept his organic brain alive, including air-filtration, blood-oxygenation and nutritional intake and storage. Raske often thought of it as his life hanging by his mouth. Heavily armoured and easy to swap-out in the event of damage, it made a sort of reverse logical sense to place such a vital component at the very front of the line of fire. Constantly charged back-up modules provided a window of organic survivability in the event that everything but his head was destroyed. It was just a question of how long his mind could survive the experience.
They were all different. His crew. Four cyborgs and one Changed.
A good crew.
They bickered, sometimes – well, apart from Steinsson and Hariwald who bickered all the time – but the general moral of the ship was usually good, despite everything. That had to count for something, Raske told himself. All their near disasters and crazy misfortune was just a stormy sea in this particular part of the journey of their lives. He was a decent skipper. A strong leader, fair but firm. And they respected him.
Apart from Nikias.
An inner voice commented. And Raske wasn’t sure whether to agree or ignore it as the suspicious vagaries of uncertainty. Nikias was a strange one. Probably more capable than all of them put together and yet strangely loyal. Gratefully loyal, which was what bugged Raske so much; because he had no idea what Nikias had to be grateful about. Which meant there had to be something he didn’t know about the tinkerer.
Nikias had a highly advanced chassis, slim and delicate, making him quick and yet incredibly strong; more synmov than metal, more synthetically organic in appearance than machine – even though it was absolutely clear that was what he was. And yet no real obvious purpose. No functional reason to his appearance and no clues within the vague stories of his background; something Nikias almost never discussed.
So why would something so advanced, competent and mysterious hang-about with a bunch of losers like them?
Raske tutted and checked himself. There was that negative attitude again.
The ramp was down. He stepped onto it and strode up into the ship.
* * *
Raske ascended the ramp into the rear of the ship with the sunset blazing behind him, throwing his compact, mechanical silhouette across the mesh surface ahead of him. He walked beneath the main staircase leading up to the catwalks and central passage, through a bulkhead hatch and into the ancillary engineering section. Malthe had moved into here wholesale, turning the space into a workshop. Crowded with hoppers of robot parts and scrapped cybernetic components. Hands, feet, claws and utility probes; spools of discard synmov. Carbo-plastic bins of assorted electrical debris and bits of metal collected from scavenger mounds across the ruins of Europe. The air was filled with the clank of heavy machinery, the hum of generators and mechanical systems idling on standby. Automated cutting tools threw off sparks as they worked on some fabricated component, within the glow of the forge.
There was a gas furnace for carburising steel (and even iron). Although the latter probably had more to do with the cravings that came from Malthe’s affliction, rather than the any obvious interest in increased surface hardness, wear resistance and tensile strength. Malthe’s kind, the Changed, were well known for their compulsive obsession for collecting and working with metal. Nobody really understood why.
The forge was Malthe’s pride and joy. It ate fuel like a fat kid locked in a candy store but somehow Malthe was able to make it pay for itself, and some. It saved money on repairs and new parts, both to the ship and to their chassis, but mainly it generated cash when they landed in places less technologically competent as Olympus Mons, and opened shop. It was hardly the picture of dreaded mercenaries for hire, grizzled war veterans in combat chassis, roaming the ravaged planet hunting down adventure; but then neither was hauling cargo like glorified dock-workers for weeks at a time.
Descending a set of reinforced metal steps, spiralling around a low wide open elevator, Raske made his way into the bowels of the engineering level, at the very base of the ship. Dampening the overwhelming sounds of the place, he caught the plaintive tones of Hariwald’s voice box cutting through his audio filters. Internally, Raske smiled. He resisted the urge to loiter and listen; Malthe was down here with Hariwald and the Changed had an uncanny ability to sense what was around him – even when in darkness or out of sight.
Stepping into a circle of clear floor space near the elevator, he found them together, doctor and patient, engineer and broken machine. Hariwald’s chassis had been suffering intermittent glitches ever since the incident with the claymore shrapnel. Malthe was bent forward, holding a laser-cutter, working on a freshly opened hip panel.
“Tristão Steinsson can come and kiss my metal arse better.”
Malthe didn’t respond; he rarely did.
Raske moved forward within the glow of amber cage-lights. “Steinsson would kick your arse before you ever got him to kiss it.”
“A turn of phrase, Skipper.” Hariwald responded without moving.
Malthe glanced up long enough to nod and acknowledge Raske’s presence, then got back to his repairs. The knuckles of his hands were swollen and arthritic, another symptom of his affliction, along with the perpetual seepage of fluid that resembled plasma – causing his bare chest and arms to glisten. Yet he applied himself with the care and attention of a surgeon.
Raske watched without comment for a while.
Hariwald’s chassis was a Boris HG-Mantak Medipede . Designed to carry wounded bots, borgs and organics out of theatre into evac or resus-stations. Large joint casings with G-TAN honeycomb structural inserts, beneath custom-weaved carbon, aramid hybrid fabrics and glass, fibre-reinforced, epoxy. Not so much expensive to fix as time-consuming. Beneath the anti-ballistics, the mechanics were pretty crude; hallmark of the Boris brand. The bulk of the raw lifting power came through hydraulics rather than synmov – the latter being the synthetic muscle systems, vat grown, for more advanced chassis. It left the Boris prone to disabling failures in movement and active strength, but, had the advantage of making the chassis much easier to repair. Malthe loved the Boris chassis. Hariwald simply put up with it: the man’s mission in life seemed to be about taking things as easy as possible. A mixture of resentment and the legacy of heavy PTSD drugs.
When he’d still been flesh and blood, Hariwald had been a medic in Operation Metal Hammer. Then he had grappled an Islamist suicide-bomber in Mecca during the Deconstruction. He stopped the device exploding but failed to stop the religious fanatic from stabbing him so many times his body became irreparable. His core biology was salvaged on decree from senior figures who wanted a hero to honour for the action taken. All his bravery got him was a cheap Boris Medipede and two years of therapy.
The Boris Medipede meant Hariwald was the biggest of all of them, but far from the strongest. Nikias probably held that honour, with his densely bundled layers of synmov, despite being tall and slim. Next was Raske – with his Riken Alpha-CYB3 combat chassis – curved plates of badly scuffed titanium alloy wrapped around bunched synmov fibres, giving him the stocky build of a weight-lifter, minus a face. Hariwald’s hydraulic powered motor systems were great for grit determination and brute force, but lost out in flexibility and mobility; both Nikias and Raske could apply their strength dynamically. So could Steinsson, more so than any of them with his high agility and reflex speed, but his chassis wasn’t built for strength – the modular segments, long limbs and absence of an abdomen gave him the appearance of an upright insect; even the face, fused armour panels and two orbs for eyes, bristling with R-TRIM sensor nodules, looked like something from a monster-bug movie.
“Nice work out there,” Raske said eventually, fixing his gaze on Malthe.
The Changed barely nodded, “Not finished yet.”
“Hmm – I was going to ask about that. I saw the avionics are all fixed now. Is there much left to do and are the engines patched up yet?”
Malthe paused, knotted knuckles clenching the laser cutter as the microscopic beam switched off; the Changed stared into some middle-distance, through Hariwald’s chassis. Raske grimaced; it was often like this when he tried to discuss work-in-progress. Malthe Herriot didn’t do justifying costs or explaining what he actually did with funds Raske gave him. He lived by results, and to be fair, Raske never really had any complaints there.
However, Malthe did seem to be more grumpy and withdrawn than usual lately; and it seemed he must have been working out because his physical frame seemed bulkier than Raske recalled.
“Ok. Just asking. I’ll erm… leave you two to it.”
The beam of the laser cutter became active again; Malthe got back to what he was doing.
* * *
Ascending back up to the cargo hold, Raske caught sight of the emaciated chassis of Tristão Steinsson – crouching down by one of the stumpy landing struts of the Harrier Stormhammer, near to where the ramp met the fuselage.
What the hell was he doing?
Then Raske spotted the Gaestel SRA Pulse rifle clutched in his spindly arms. Steinsson looked as if he was stalking something, every limb moving in slow-motion with the perfect balance of his recon-trooper chassis. As Raske watched, Steinsson jacked the first power-cell into the chamber, brought the butt up to his shoulder, and fired. The weapon didn’t kick but it made a noise that Raske felt more than heard. Pulse weapons released a directional shock wave that could stun or kill…or even blow holes through breeze-block and plasterboard walls. They were the favourite of Akinola-Odusola’s dreaded corporate security forces, providing the ultimate in versatility: non-lethal to lethal at the flick of a switch. Armour had no effect, which made them potentially deadly against a cybernetic machine – they could pulp the soft tissue of a human brain with a single shot. The G-shock gel wrapped around Raske’s vital areas was a great defence but very few cyborgs carried such features.
Steinsson’s shot didn’t do any damage to the internal hull of the cargo hold, but Raske heard the unmistakable slithering sound of blob – Nikias’ home-made Thing as it hurried away. Hunting the blob had become the recon trooper’s latest fascination since the fun of The Cream Citadel of Tashkent had started to wear thin.
“You know Nikias will probably tear you a new gas vent if you harm that thing.” Raske advised soberly.
The recon trooper remained frozen, chassis locked in a stooping crouch, head tilted to one side, all senses focussed on his quarry – the rifle pressed firmly into the flexible shoulder plate. There was a long pause before Steinsson replied, straightening up as he did so:
“Harm it? It’s bloody indestructible. I’ve shot it with every weapon we have on this crate and I’ve barely scratched it.”
# # #
END OF EXCERPT
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A novel
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David J Rodger – DATA
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