ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2) (26 page)

I should have never come here. I should have told Fan to take me directly to that oxygen extractor of his. Then at least I would have had a chance. But now, faced with this stubborn mech, I was going to die.

It was time to pull out all the stops. “Battlehawk. This entire situation is an emergency. For the both of us. Look, when was the last time you were in contact with your platoon, or the ship? That’s right, more than eight months ago. I’m trapped on this planet. As are you. My ship,
our
ship, abandoned this system. I’m the only member of the UC Navy left on this world. And I’m surrounded by hostiles.

“Bioengineered animal packs manufactured by the SKs roam the plains. And below the surface lurk the beasts, the alien lifeforms I’m certain you’ve encountered. So I have no doubt this qualifies as an emergency situation. To protect me, you have to let me inside your cockpit. You have to let me pilot you. I’m vulnerable out here. Dying. Don’t you detect the radiation in the air? There’s better rad shielding inside your cockpit. Battlehawk? My oxygen is running out. You have to let me in. You have to open up.”

I sat down, lowered my head, and rested my helmet on my knees. Stupid, stubborn mechs with their stupid, stubborn AIs.

I heard an unexpected click come from the direction of the ATLAS 5, followed by the clang of a metallic door falling open.

I looked up.

The central hatch of the mech had fallen open, and the cockpit beckoned within.

“Thank you,” I said, climbing to my feet.

“Stow your weapon in the provided storage rack before you enter,” Battlehawk said.

That’s right. Because an internal cocoon would wrap my body when I went into the cockpit, the only weapon I could really carry was a pistol at my belt. The rifle would just get pushed into my jumpsuit, and might even puncture it.

“I don’t see the rack. Where—”

A sound came from behind the mech, like metal shuddering aside. I supposed another compartment had just opened up.

I went to the back of the mech and sure enough discovered a recess behind its leg. Within, an empty rack awaited my weapon. I stowed the SK rifle in the rack, placing all the ammunition I’d taken from Fan on the provided shelf. There were already some grenades and ammunition rounds on the shelf, I noted.

“Weapon stowed.” I stepped back.

A panel irised closed, concealing the recess.

I went to the front of the mech, climbed the leg rungs, stepped onto the open hatch, and swung myself inside the cockpit. I oriented my body so that I faced outward. I glanced into the crack between the hatch and the hull, peering at the brain case and confirming that it wasn’t surrounded by the glowing vapor of a Phant.

The hatch closed.

The inner shell of the cockpit pressed into me from all sides. I couldn’t see anything except the mech’s dark interior. Despite all my simulator hours, I was entirely unprepared for the sudden feeling of claustrophobia.

I tried to pretend I was somewhere else. Astrogating a starship in the vast openness of space, maybe. Yes. I was in space now, not buried under three tonnes of metal.

It didn’t work.

I started hyperventilating.

Battlehawk’s sensor arrays routed their audio and video feeds to my helmet, so that I viewed the world from the mech’s perspective.

It didn’t help.

“Switch me over to your internal
O
₂
tanks, Battlehawk,” I gasped. Maybe I was running out of oxygen. That must be the problem.

I heard a series of metallic clanks behind me as the feed valves of my oxygen canisters connected to the recharge lines of the mech; the ATLAS 5’s main O
₂
lines now fed directly into my jumpsuit’s life-support system.

“Oxygen recharge initiated,” Battlehawk said.

I was still hyperventilating.

I had the presence of mind to check the O
₂
levels of Battlehawk’s tanks. They were nearly full. So oxygen wasn’t the problem.

I had to stop breathing this way. Every moment of hyperventilation was a moment of wasted air. Besides, I couldn’t pilot the mech, not like this.

I shouldn’t have felt this way. Life aboard a cramped starship certainly wasn’t for those who feared confined places. But this was different somehow. At least on a starship, I actually had room to move. Here, I was clamped in
on all sides
.

You can get through this, Shaw. You have to.

I closed my eyes and thought back to my days as a child on the farm. Picking apples, bringing them to the grinder, bottling the cider. The work was done entirely by hand, without robots. There was something soothing about leaving out the machine element and interacting directly with nature. You knew your own hands would never break down, or turn on you.

In my mind’s eye, the farmland stretched to the horizon on all sides. Unhindered. No walls. No cocoons.

My breathing stabilized.

I opened my eyes.

I pretended what I saw was the view from my own body. That I wasn’t trapped inside three tonnes of metal. It wasn’t so different from my own consciousness, I supposed, trapped within the flesh and blood of my body. Not so different at all.

I waited a moment, taking long breaths. I could do this.

I took a tentative step. It felt like I was moving my leg through deep water. I sensed the mech shift, and I knew the matching steel foot had moved with me. I glanced downward, and took another step, watching Battlehawk’s leg travel in sync with my own.

But looking down was a mistake, because I nearly lost my balance.

I flung out my arms to stabilize myself, and the mech’s arms moved in concert with my own. I managed to remain upright by having the mech grip the rock face beside me.

I kept Battlehawk’s steel hand braced against the rock and took a few more exploratory steps. I proceeded forward slowly and carefully, and grew more confident with each step. The sensation of trudging through deep water subsided, and I removed Battlehawk’s hand from the wall.

I was actually getting the hang of it. It was like I merely resided within an extra-large jumpsuit. Piloting three tonnes of metal wasn’t so bad, not at all. And I rather enjoyed it. I felt powerful. Invincible. Ready to take on an army of beasts. I probably could, now.

I remembered all the stories Rade had told me; how he’d faced countless hordes of those crabs and slugs and just mowed them down. I’d thought he was exaggerating at the time, but I realized, inside a mech like this, I could probably kill a crab simply by stepping on it. The smaller ones, anyway.

The endless, repetitive whir of servomotors reflected from the walls around me. Below, shards sometimes flew upward as my massive feet crunched into the shale underfoot. That’s right, I finally no longer thought of those feet as Battlehawk’s, but
mine
.

I was Battlehawk, now. An ATLAS 5 mech. Designed for combat. Bred for dealing death. I was reborn as a being of steel, servomotors, rockets, and bullets. No one, not man, not hybear, not even beast, could defy me. I almost wished a sinkhole would open up right here, so I could prove myself.

Then again, that probably wasn’t a good idea . . .

Don’t fall for your own bull, Shaw.

There was one thing I had to do before passing the bend and rejoining my companions.

“Battlehawk, a few moments ago you fired on one of the non-native lifeforms of this planet,” I said.

“SK bioweapon, class B, hyena-bear recombinant,” Battlehawk said. “Hostile.”

“Well yes, I suppose they are, in general. But this lifeform is nonhostile. You are not, I repeat, not to fire upon him. His name is Queequeg, and he is my friend.”

Battlehawk did not answer.

“Battlehawk, give me your assurance that you won’t fire on Queequeg. He’s saved my life more times than I can remember. Battlehawk?”

No answer.

Sometimes it was a matter of wording the request the right way, because apparently certain keywords influenced the AI’s decision tree algorithm more than others. How did I do it in the simulator again? “Battlehawk, tag the previously encountered lifeform as nonhostile.”

“Tagging previous lifeform as nonhostile,” the AI said.

So that was it. “Thank you.”

The bend proved a tight fit, and only with effort did I jam my new, larger body past the cramped walls. I inflicted several more dents in the arms, legs, and chest piece.

Queequeg waited precisely where I’d left him, guarding Fan. The animal was looking right at me, his eyes big as saucers.

Queequeg turned around and hightailed it out of the defile.

“Queequeg, wait!” I said. “Battlehawk, broadcast my—”

But Battlehawk was already loading the Gatlings into my hands.

“Battlehawk, stand down, what are you doing? Battlehawk, I’m in control now! We agreed, remember?”

Apparently I wasn’t, and we hadn’t.

As Queequeg vanished beyond the entrance to the defile, Battlehawk trained its twin Gatling guns on Fan.

Oh.

The SK raised his palms in surrender, and backed away.

“Target acquired,” Battlehawk said in its authoritative male voice. “Preparing to terminate.”

“Stand down!” I said. “He is a friendly.”

Battlehawk did not stand down.

Knowing he could never reach the defile’s entrance in time, Fan fell to his knees and put his hands behind his head.

Battlehawk, not me,
never
me, took a massive step forward.

“Battlehawk!” I said. “He is unarmed. He is a friendly. A civilian! Stand down!”

I frantically resisted the movements of the cocoon that wrapped me, but I was pinned, locked inside this steel body, just an observer, powerless to do anything. I would watch helplessly as Fan was gunned down.

“Embedded ID profile inconclusive,” Battlehawk said.

That’s right, Fan had wiped his public profile, and because he was SK, the mech couldn’t access Fan’s private profile. Assuming he even had one.

“Facial recognition in progress,” Battlehawk continued. “Sino-Korean feature match. Correlating with NGI biometric database.” Military-grade UC AIs stored a local, apparently secure copy of the Next Generation Identification database, which contained the biometrics—facial features, fingerprints, retinal scans—of all UC citizens. “Target is not a UC citizen. Target queued for termination.”

“Yes he’s SK, but he’s a
civilian
,” I pleaded.

“Target queued for termination,” Battlehawk persisted.

“No,” I said. “He’s a civilian. And he’s helping me. Battlehawk, if you kill him, you disobey your own programming to protect me. Because if he dies, I die. Battlehawk, do you understand? You can’t kill him. Battlehawk?” Then I remembered the magic words. “Battlehawk, tag the target as civilian.”

A moment passed.

“Tagging target as civilian.” The Gatlings folded away.

I’d been pressing so hard against the inner cocoon that when the mech suddenly ceded control back to me, my arms almost slammed together.

Fan slumped. He held his gloves to his face mask, and I thought he was trying to hide tears of relief.

Honestly, I felt like crying too.

But there was still the matter of Queequeg.

“Queequeg?” I shouted.

No response came from the edge of the defile.

I didn’t want to approach and scare him further. I knew he was waiting out there somewhere beyond the defile. At least, I hoped he was.

I was loath to leave the cockpit to retrieve Queequeg, not after all the work it had taken to convince Battlehawk to let me inside in the first place. Who knows? If I went out maybe Battlehawk would decide my updated O
₂
situation no longer warranted an emergency situation.

I’d just have to find a way to convince Queequeg to obey me while I was still inside the mech.

“Battlehawk, voice amplification, maximum.”

“Voice amplification maximum,” Battlehawk repeated.

“Queequeg?” I said.

I winced as the close walls deflected the amplified syllables back at me.

Fan slid his hands over his helmet, where his ears would have been were he not wearing a jumpsuit.

I turned the voice amplification down a notch. “Queequeg?”

Still no response.

I supposed I’d have to risk leaving the mech after all, because I wasn’t going to continue without Queequeg. But if I ejected, and went to the animal, there was still the problem of introducing him to the ATLAS. This wouldn’t work if Queequeg ran away every time I boarded Battlehawk . . .

I decided to try one last thing before I left the cockpit: a lullaby I sang to Queequeg shortly after I’d found him, when he was still an abandoned babe swathed in his mother’s umbilical. It was a lullaby my own mother had sung to me.

“Tender one, sleep tonight. Sleep, because though the dark is near, the stars will always guide you.”

Queequeg timidly poked his head around the far end of the defile.

I continued the song. When I beckoned with one hand, the movement caused him to duck beyond the rim of the defile once more.

I sang away.

Queequeg’s head eventually appeared again.

I beckoned—I had to get him used to seeing the mech move.

Queequeg didn’t shirk this time. He just remained still, his eyes saucer-shaped, his ears and mane folded flat.

I stopped singing for a moment and said, “Battlehawk, tag target as nonhostile.” Just in case.

“Target already tagged as nonhostile.”

I resumed the lullaby.

Queequeg apparently screwed up his courage, because the animal finally approached. Very cautiously.

I continued to beckon, but not too quickly. I didn’t want to make any sudden movements. I was humming the song now, letting Queequeg come near.

Fan watched dumbfounded. I supposed all of this would appear somewhat ludicrous to a bystander. It wasn’t every day you saw an ATLAS mech humming a lullaby to a bioengineered bear-hyena hybrid. But hey, this was my pet we were talking about here, and I didn’t care if I embarrassed myself in front of Fan.

Queequeg halted twenty paces from Battlehawk. He seemed like a small rabbit to me from up here.