Numina code, p.19
Numina Code, page 19
Human, she reminded herself.
There had been a human in there. And while her active-duty predictive counterparts did not concern themselves with deaths they were not responsible for, Emily had been in the Guard a long time.
Search and rescue, disaster response, was a facet of her primary purpose. Preventing civilian deaths was part of the mission.
She looked out to space again. Two minutes, perhaps a little more. The other objects were moving more slowly.
Summoning the power in the kugu’s legs, she shoved off the wall and fired thrusters all at once, rocketing toward the shattered remains of the ship. She did not doubt the nature of what was coming at them.
Whatever was on the approaching spacecraft, it had no intention of allowing anyone on this station to live.
She reached the remnants of the ship in seconds, grabbing at a broad section of hull. It cut the silicone off the kugu’s hand, but that was of little importance. Emily catalogued the scene, not quite sure how to interpret this debris field.
The rock had been moving slow. Slow enough to not crush through the ablative wall inside the docking bay, but more than enough to take Magellan’s Bird apart. Its delicate bulkheads had been unable to cope with the force of impact. The ship was a cloud of debris now, like those engineering diagrams in Daelia’s mechatronic textbooks, machines blown apart to show the relative location of their components.
Where would the human be?
Cockpit, she decided, or air lock.
The cockpit, she could tell, was fucked.
The air lock, on the other hand, seemed more robust.
Emily found the human Skorokhodov huddled in what remained of the compartment. The entire module had ripped free of the ship, implanted itself in the thin skin of the docking bay hull. The outer doors had deformed from the impact, but the inner were still sealed. And jittering. She pushed her kugu into the space, sacrificing a thruster-nozzle to make it inside. Emily grumbled at this; she had only just started on her movement algorithms and now all would have to be recalculated. Lovely.
The human was alive, though perhaps not for long. He had smoothed silvery tape over what Emily assumed were tears in his suit.
He started when she reached for him.
Why alive?
he said, and smiled within the helmet. The expression did not look as it had before. The kugu’s TGLP indicated an 85% chance that he was in pain.
Injured?
He nodded. Once. Tight. And pointed.
“Leg’s wrong.”
Emily looked at it, analyzing what she saw. She did not have a casualty evaluation module on this kugu, but from what she knew of human anatomy, she judged that something had gone wrong in there. And then she noticed blood droplets. Inside his helmet.
He was bleeding from a cut on his head. Profusely.
We go in, she said.
He nodded again and reached for her. Emily almost threw him off, and then realized he was clipping them together. Tether line. So they wouldn’t float away from each other.
Emily grunted. The kugu made the noise all wrong, but he caught it anyway. Cockpit smashed, she said honestly. Mags have battery?
Now no worry about her. Worry self. Emily pointed. More ship come.
Emily followed his gaze.
The ship was within visual range now. Detail clear. She pulled herself free of the door, braced her kugu to help him through. The suit was too bulky to fit through the opening, and Skoro started fighting the manual controls.
What come?
Impact not accident, Emily said. Projectile.
Daelia and Argo were inside. She had a duty to them. Promises. But here was an injured civilian. Competing priorities, these. The Texas Military Department’s disaster support guidelines chafed at her.
Moral quandaries. How Emily hated them.
She slipped back in. What do?
Emily put her hands where he showed her. She disliked this. Fingers, palms, thumbs. No patagium. No elongated autopods.
Between them, they got the door open, and just in time.
The ship slipping into the bay fired out a docking line.
Its air lock opened, blowing a cold mist out ahead of it.
A kugu was standing there, the alien ones. For a moment, Emily regarded it, sensing it out. There was something in the AR field. Something… It was broadcasting, she realized. Deep in her rudiment core, she smiled her predator’s smile. Oh yes, oh yes, there it was. She was going to—
It snapped her kugu back and away. A DEW blast shot past them, impacting the hangar wall, only just missing her. She oriented her kugu to him and, grabbing the injured human, opened the flight algorithm she’d been working on.
Her wings coalesced.
Emily took off.
The kugu obeyed, thrusters firing. Adjustments were hard, but the vector was good enough to get them back into the cargo air lock. A grab at a hand bar snapped Skoro out hard, but she swung her kugu into the personnel air lock, dragging him in behind.
From the enemy ship, kugus followed.
How this close?!
She found it and threw it, the doors sliding together. The kugus were flying for them now.
One got an arm in, gun outstretched, and the doors stopped. Started opening.
Emily took one look at it, evaluating her options at the speed of light. And as fast as she could get the kugu to move, she responded.
She yanked the enemy kugu in by the front of its gun, twisting as she did so. The angular momentum threw the kugu across the air lock, smashing it into the far wall. But she kept the gun.
Emily used the thing like a club to knock back the next pair of kugus that was approaching. That flung them back into their own formation, a chain reaction that cleared them from the air lock mouth for a moment.
The doors flew shut. The indicator lights turned yellow.
She looked to Skoro.
He was shaking his head. Blood was everywhere, filling his helmet. Strange, undulating globs. It was a liquid, Emily knew, one that occasionally came out of humans in great quantities. She had seen it many times through her cameras. Liquid, liquid…
You not breathe liquid yes?
Skoro nodded but didn’t answer her.
She wondered if he was holding his breath. Humans did that sometimes. A curious thing, voluntarily cutting oneself off from the medium that sustained the rudiment core.
Sound returned as air flowed into the chamber.
The kugu was moving.
Emily pushed over to it. She had smashed it into the back wall harder than she had realized, and it was malfunctioning. Still deadly to Skoro, she thought. But she had never disabled a kugu without the help of her missiles before and wasn’t sure what to do.
So she did. With the captured gun, she hit it again and again. Until it came apart.
Skoro was there then, face stained red. “Stop,” he said, coughing more. He was spitting blood. “Stop, Emily, it’s dead.”
Emily took one more look at the thing.
Not like you, she said, and smashed the kugu’s face in with the butt of the gun. Its eye-lenses shattered. The last lights in the chassis went dark. Now sense-suite dead.
The light above the inner door blinked green. Skoro, still coughing, jerked the control handle down. “Come on,” he said, and jerked at her kugu.
“Doors,” she said, and pointed. “We jam?”
“No, we need to go,” he said, and jerked her away.
“Where you go?” she asked as they headed into the station.
“Medical,” Skoro said.
Emily had the map uploaded to her kugu’s navigation system and pulled it up now. The medical bay was at the very top of the shaft. Convenient, really. An easy vector to follow. She spread her wings out and flapped up, holding Skoro with one of her kugu’s hands.
“Saved by a dragon,” Skoro coughed. She realized he still had a monocle on. “Hell of a story.”
“Good?”
“If I make it, sure.”
“Why we no jam doors?”
“Can’t, short of a full mechanical override. These stations are designed with life safety, not defense, in mind. As long as it’s not pressurizing, the outer doors are designed to open on command.”
“Even if something in inner door?”
“Yeah, they give a three-second alarm, then come down like guillotines,” he said. “Stupid right now, eh?”
Blood was still drifting freely from his forehead as they made for the bay. Emily looked at it. “They will follow trail, once inside.”
“Then we don’t have very long,” he said. He was turning pale. “Get me out of this thing.”
“Cut it?”
“Intact, Jesus fuck, come on,” he groaned.
Emily set her kugu’s auditory sensors to maximum gain, even as she helped the human wrestle out of his protective gear. It took them both to strip it off him, and when it finally came off, Emily did not like what she saw. Bone was poking through the skin of his left calf.
He caught her gaze and nodded. “Yeah, I must have hit the wall harder than I thought, when the air lock cut free. I need a splint.”
Emily wasn’t sure what to say. She had seen many humans hurt before—had killed quite a few herself—but never up close like this. “What that?”
He leaned back on the medical bed, a fistful of gauze pressed to his forehead, and pointed at a cabinet. “Should be in there. Should be labeled. Splint or bone-break kit, something like that.”
Emily took this to mean he wanted her to look and hurried over to the indicated cabinet. She rummaged around, throwing things out until she found a package that said TEMPORARY LEG CAST. The TGLP informed her this was a synonym for the item he had requested. She held it up triumphantly.
“How upload?”
“No uploads, Emily. This is meatspace, remember?” He gestured to her. “Come over. Rip the bag open. No, wait. Give it to me. I’ll do it.”
She heard movement. The enemy kugus were inside the habitat now. “I go,” she said. “They come.”
Skoro was busy slipping the strange thing up and around his malfunctioning leg. “Go.”
Emily grabbed his helmet on the way out. The thing was still full of blood, the strange buoyancy of weightlessness preventing the liquid from falling out.
This was good.
Grabbing the thing in her claws, Emily threw herself back out into the main atrium again, wheeling. The algorithm she’d written for her kugu outside wasn’t quite as good inside, but then, Emily knew how to fly in air. She scattered the blood everywhere, erasing the trail to the medical bay. She hoped.
Emily puffed her dragon-form up in the AR. Filled the space as best she could.
Six kugus fired thrusters against their own forward vectors, braking.
Concern leaked out of them in the AR as surely as piss from a biota.
They were definitely connected.
They hesitated a moment when they saw her.
Excellent.
The fight that followed was short, brutal, and reminded her far too much of her recent tussle with the Storm Gryphons. The kugus came at her all at once, accelerating hard, trying to ram her. She swooped up in a tight barrel roll, missing the first strike entirely, one unable to correct in time and crashing straight into one of the little shops that lined that level of the habitat shaft.
The others compensated.
Hands scrambled for her. Weapons fired. Some of it she could dodge, some she could not. She was fighting her own instincts: this was not the sky she normally flew in. One grabbed her and yanked her down, throwing her toward the group.
Emily spread her wings, claws around her kugu’s fingers, and grabbed back.
Contact was useful here, she decided as she grabbed an enemy’s leg. She threw it into a pillar. But the movement threw her back as well, and she was drifting again.
In the time it took her kugu to recover, they were on her again.
She abandoned her notions of flying. Grappling was better here. She struck out: arms, legs, gun. Emily had little familiarity with human hand weaponry, none with these DEW guns, and was unsure exactly how to manipulate an energy blast out of hers. The gun seemed to do plenty of damage as a club, so she continued to strike with that.
It broke over the false skull of the fourth kugu, though.
The last two had her.
A DEW gun blast caught her kugu’s shoulder, ripping something important free. The limb went dead. Those hands were back, tearing at the ruined metal. Emily screeched in rage and kicked one of the offenders, sending her flying up, corkscrewing. Another blast caught her on the back, clipping a thruster.
The system went offline.
She tumbled upward, back toward the medical bay. According to the station schematics, Medical here was built as a life raft too, like the air lock on Magellan’s Bird, a habitat with the station, reinforced with hermetic bulkheads, an air lock, and a sealing door. In case of a disaster.
Skoro had already activated this.
She was trapped outside.
The last kugu rose up and fired.
For a moment, a fraction of a fraction of a second, Emily was frozen. Calculating her kugu’s odds of surviving. They weren’t good.
But then a rage welled up in her.
She was old and she was canny and she was not going to let this mute thing piloting the enemy kugu be the death of her. She cycled her thrusters up as high as they could go, firing one side only, turning and smashing into it.
The force of the blow knocked the enemy kugu away, the lighting flickering, then dying as it fell. The cost, however, her own kugu’s left shoulder. Something in there was damaged badly now. She could feel it almost like pain. Strange feedback. She had never been hurt like that in her machine body.
Deep below, the air lock dinged again.
Reinforcements, she surmised.
And then Emily did something she was loath to do.
She fled.
There was one last individual back on Earth she could call who might help.
Maybe.
24
“Smart,” Argo commented to his brother as they headed through the oxygen garden, into the control room where there was, apparently, a working AR terminal. “Coming down here.”
“Yeah, water, air. Some food, although vegetables won’t really get you all that far by themselves. We weren’t sure if they were going to turn anything else in the rock off,” Aiden said. He sounded a thousand miles away from the cocky kid Argo had last spoken to, the day before the air show, when everything went to hell. “I thought it was the best place to come.”
“You did that?”
“Yeah, man,” Aiden said, smiling at him, familiar and strange at the same time. “What good were all those hunting trips back home if I never use those skills again?”
“Hunting in Alaska’s a little different than surviving in an asteroid.”
“Same kind of principle though,” Aiden said. “Stay alive.”
Argo wanted to ask his brother what had happened up here, what was with the haunted tone in his voice, but they were at the control room and there was the AR terminal, and it was going to have to wait.
One of the survivors had been an IT support tech, and between him and Daelia, the AR field was soon displaying a map of the station. Argo had his monocle and Tomas had a translucent tablet and haptic glove, but the others who’d tagged along had to use the monitors to see what they were referencing.
It occurred to Argo that nobody in the room had a NULI. He asked his brother about it, quietly.
“I don’t know,” Aiden replied. “Nobody with one of those things made it.”
“What do you mean?”
“They were either, umm, killed or dragged off by the kugus.”
“Before anybody else?” Argo asked.
Now his brother looked disturbed. “Yeah, actually, I think so. Shit, I hadn’t even—”
“So this is the best map we’ve got of the tunnel system?” Daelia asked loudly, cutting off their conversation.
The projection filled Argo’s field of vision. Tomas walked around, tablet held up so he could see. His screen, Argo realized, was made of the same stuff that was sandwiched between the acrylic windows back on Aethera. Waterfall film. Expensive but effective. It gave Tomas a depth of field and manipulation abilities he wouldn’t have had with a more traditional tablet.
“This is current as of last month’s seismic scan,” Tomas confirmed. “We do them quarterly.”
Argo studied it for a moment. “Where are we?”
Tomas used the glove to light up the correct cavern. “Right here.”
“And where were you attacked?”
“I don’t think—”
Argo folded his arms, looking. “Doesn’t matter if it’s exact. Let’s plot it out as best we can, see if there’s a pattern.”
“Okay,” Tomas said, and raised his voice a little. “Let’s go around the room. Rachel, you start. Places you were attacked or encountered kugus, and when.”
Some people volunteered the information eagerly. Others had to be prompted to speak up. Survivors came and went, some leaving in the middle of a story or wandering in out of curiosity. By the time they got to Aiden and Tomas though, the last two to speak, the room was crowded, hot.
