Machines of Eden (25 page)

He heard someone moving
behind him, and in his peripheral vision he glimpsed a woman
stepping out into the hallway after him.

He froze, crouching in
panic.
How did she sneak up on
me?

She didn’t look like
Janice, however. She was shorter and slenderer, in a sleek
jumpsuit, and had a tight hairdo. And she was just staring at him.
She looked strangely ethereal, almost translucent, and John thought
he detected a bluish tinge to her edges.

A hologram. Which means
she’s just distracting me from--

He whirled back toward the
hatch in the far wall, ignoring the image of the woman pulling a
gun out and firing at him. He couldn’t hear anything over the roar
of gunfire from the projected woman, but he could see the little
hatchway open at the base of the wall, and a stream of small
insects came scuttling out.

Not insects.
Spyders!

His heart thumped
dangerously in his chest. The little beetle-like mini-bots would be
rigged with explosive shrapnel, tiny grenades that would swarm to
their target and then detonate all around him. As the harmless
gunfire faded away from behind him, he could hear the
clickety-click of their little legs on the floor. There was nowhere
to go in the cramped hallway.

His quick analysis of the
hologram and the real threat emanating from the hatch had given him
a few precious seconds in which to act. Fleeing backward would only
subject him to the previous dangers as well as the spyders coming
for him, so he began to sprint toward the miniature suicide
bots.

Flinging himself over the
first of them and then dancing past them like a firewalker, he
reached the end of the hallway in a leap and a bound. The first
explosion fired off behind him and he felt one stinging hit on the
back of his leg. He jumped, putting out a leg to his left and
propelling himself off the left wall to dive into the next L-bend
of hallway to the right.

On hands and knees, keeping
his head down in front of him to avoid getting shrapnel in the back
of his skull, he hurried away from the string of tiny explosions
rippling toward him with only a few microseconds’ delay. Three
meters ahead there was a large door taking up the whole width and
height of the corridor. He rushed to it and thrust his hand into an
alcove in the wall containing a palm-scanner. He hammered at the
pad with his fist, trying to break it. He was painfully aware of
the clicking of tiny unexploded spyders coming after
him.

Open, open,
open!

The scanner pad turned red.
On instinct John jerked his hand away quickly. A little arm with a
needle shot out of the alcove’s side wall, piercing the air where
his hand had been and squirting something viscous from the needle
tip.

This is a nightmare. Even
occupied Belarus was more forgiving than this!

The lead spyder was already
a meter from him. Desperate, he lunged forward and grabbed it, then
flicked it at the scanner alcove in the split second before it
detonated. It blasted the inside of the alcove and the light inside
died. An orange status light above the door turned yellow and
started flashing.

He grabbed the door by its
manual clamp handle and wrenched at it. It slid up, and he slipped
through just in time to slam it shut on the tide of little spyder
bots approaching. The huge door provided several layers of metal
and insulation between him and the dangers of the
hallway.

Finally. Somewhere I can
catch my breath.

He was in an airlock-style
vestibule with another large door leading into the interior room.
He walked to the other door, ready for a final effort to break in.
Then the vents overhead began to whir, and a hissing, sucking sound
deafened him.

If that’s gas, I’m
dead.

But nothing came out of the
vents. His hands feverishly clawed at the lock panel of the door in
front of him, fumbling with tools from his kit and ramming them
into the cracks and bolts. He knew he was at the mercy of the
system in this little deathtrap room, and wondered how aware Eve
was of his movements. She hadn’t spoken since he entered Level One,
but she had to be getting notifications of the defenses going
off.

He had the panel off and
the wires twisted when he realized that his chest was heaving
beyond what his physical effort required. He was having difficulty
breathing, and his head felt squeezed and dizzy. He couldn’t hear
anything, not even the click of his tools against each
other.

Then it hit him.
Vacuum chamber.

He couldn’t breathe because
there was no air. If he stayed in here he would end up inside-out
with his blood boiling out of his ears. If he tried to open the
door behind, he would let in a stream of spyder shrapnel that would
bounce around the airlock until he was soup.

At least I’ll die in
peaceful silence
.

His head burst and his eyes
popped, or at least felt like it. He could hardly see, and felt
like he was swimming. He hallucinated that he was floating in the
vacuum, gravity gone, and that his head was banging against the
door in front of him.

His head banged against the
floor inside the room beyond the airlock. He slowly swam back to
his senses, or they swam back to his head, and he looked
up.

The door had opened, and he
was breathing. Whether the force of habit and years of training had
kept his hands working just long enough to cut that last wire, or
whether he had accidentally touched something in the panel that had
made the final connection to open the door, he didn’t have any
idea. He thanked every higher power he knew of in case any of them
had intervened, and he sat up.

Janice could not remember
ever being so angry. Her breath came in sharp pants, almost barks.
Her face was flushed a dark red, and her hands shook. With an
effort she stilled them. You couldn’t fire a rifle with shaking
hands.

That... that...

She didn’t know a word vile
enough to express what she felt.

He’s going to ruin
everything. First Glenn, and now him. How I hate them! All of
them!

She was in good shape and
she relished the burning feeling in her thighs and calves as she
trotted through the jungle. Beside and behind her rolled the bots.
She felt nothing toward them, no affection, certainly no love. They
were inorganics, useful enough for the moment, but with no place in
the larger scheme of things. And Janice was all about the larger
scheme of things.

She remembered the first
time she’d met Glenn, how impressed she’d been, almost in awe in
spite of herself. It wasn’t his fame, though he was known the world
over to both Greens and Grays. And it hadn’t been his intelligence,
although no known test had fully quantified his abilities. It had
been his vision, a far-off look in his eyes that made you think he
was seeing something wonderful that normal people would never
understand. She'd had no difficulty acting captivated when he asked
her to become his research assistant and confidante. And the next
few years had been genuinely mind-expanding, glorious.

But then she’d learned the
truth. It brought her back to the reality of her
mission.

Glenn had limitations.
Lines he was afraid to cross.

The disappointment had been
as keen as a knife-cut. And it had only been much later, after many
tears and some screamed arguments, that she had realized the irony
of it all.

Glenn hadn’t the courage or
the conviction.

But I
do
.

It had been an epiphany, a
trembling moment when the future became as clear as glass and she
knew exactly, for the first time in her life, what she had been
born to accomplish. She had felt dizzy with the magnitude of it.
Glenn had given her the tools, but to her fell the awful
responsibility.

It made killing him much
easier.

A branch slapped her
across the face, bringing her back to the present. She was sweating
heavily in her jumpsuit, rivulets running down her cheeks and back.
The jungle was steaming with humidity. She cursed as she tripped
over a root, wishing for the cool air-conditioned interior of the
Facility, then catching herself.
Soon
there will be no such thing as air conditioning, or a Facility to
shelter in. I must make Mother’s earth-lap my heaven.

It would be over in less
than an hour. She’d find and corner the techie with the help of her
bots, put a bullet in his brain, then run diagnostics to ensure he
hadn’t messed anything up.

She felt a wave of
frustration with Eve; the techie had been allowed too much leeway.
She’d have to have a frank chat with Eve and set her to
rights.
Nothing can be allowed to hinder
the schedule!

Janice shifted the rifle’s
sling to her other shoulder and stepped over another tangled root.
Her boot slipped, however, and she lurched to one side, hitting her
head on a tree.

As she fell, she felt a
supersonic
whip
go past her ear; immediately drowned out by the earsplitting
chatter of automatic weapon fire. Tree bark pelted her cheek as she
wriggled frantically behind a fallen log.

The entire jungle seemed to
have exploded. Leaves shredded and hovered in a green haze in the
humid air. Her bots were returning fire. She saw a small tree
shudder, then fall as if cut in half by an invisible axe. She
rolled, jerking her rifle off her shoulder and desperately checking
it for damage.

It can’t be him, can
it?

It had to be. She screamed
in frustration and pounded the soil with a fist.

One of her bots, a battered
old Humboldt unit, stepped from behind a tree to return fire. Its
head suddenly exploded in a blaze of sparks. The torso remained
standing, weapons blazing in a futile response to its last command.
The Humboldt’s CPU was in the torso, but its optics had been in the
head, and it was firing blindly in the direction it had seen an
enemy. Janice peered in that direction but saw nothing through the
tangle of creepers. She wriggled to the left for a better
view.

Twenty meters away, a large
killer bot, designated KB01, paused in its firing to let its gun
barrels cool. It switched to flechette canisters while initiating a
search program – motion sensors for the inorganics and infrared for
the organic it had spotted seconds earlier.

KB01 had already engaged
and destroyed two enemy bots in less than six seconds, designated
as Targets 2 and 3, but it had missed Target 1 through sheer chance
when the organic slipped in the mud, narrowly avoiding the bullet
sent her way.

KB01’s coolant vents
whirred softly. It would have another chance. Organics never
remained still for very long. When she moved, she would be
dead.

Ten meters to KB01’s left,
KB02 was performing a rapid scan of its kill zone. A Cobalt Scorpio
2.5 lay smoking on the jungle floor, four of its legs missing from
KB02’s opening salvo. Had KB02 been capable of feeling chagrin it
would have done so; the Scorpio’s legs had absorbed much of the
impact of KB02’s fire and saved the bots behind it. They were now
initiating a flanking maneuver to attack from all sides and
overwhelm KB02. Even now the sounds of their approach filtered
through KB02’s audio dampening systems. It calculated their
probable attack pattern and readied itself.

Janice crawled on all fours
toward a large mound of earth, the residue of a fallen tree’s root
systems. Her eyes smarted as sweat ran into them and she blinked
furiously. Safely behind the root tangle, she forced herself to
calm down. There was no way to tell how many there were. Some bots,
certainly; there had been too much fire to come from the techie
alone.

Is Nut involved?
No, he is too far gone to leave his hiding
places, or to have orchestrated an ambush like this. His time has
come, but I can’t deal with him now. This is the work of the
intruder, and it’s threatening everything!

She remembered the bots in
the service bay. They were nearly ready for deployment, but she had
been too busy to finish them and send them out on patrol. They had
just been sitting there like wrapped presents for the techie
running amok on her island.

Stupid, stupid!

She raged in silence,
frightened in spite of herself at how close she’d come to
dying.
If I hadn’t slipped... and how did
Eve let him get to the bots?
That could
wait for later. Eve had much to answer for.

She slowly peeked around
the edge of the root tangle. The jungle was silent here, but
several meters away she could hear her bots advancing to engage the
ambushers. Now was the time to move, while the enemy was
distracted. If she could circle around she might get a chance at a
rifle shot from behind. Precision fire was the best way to take out
bots in the absence of heavier guns. If she was lucky, she might
even get a clear shot at the techie.

Janice licked her
lips.