Breach the Hull Read online

  What the hell was I?

  The other guy hit a switch or something before I could move. The snake-necked lamps ignited with a strange blaze of blinding energy. It felt like a sledge-hammer with a red hot head slamming home into my skull.

  Out again. (Maybe that was good. If I had been awake, I would have been pretty miffed about being knocked unconscious every few minutes.) Waking up was more fun the next time. I was floating again, nice and safe in zero-gee. In free-fall . . .

  I shouted and grabbed for something to hang onto, some weapon to shoot. I got a handful of water and splashed myself in the face.

  Blinking my eyes clear, I saw I was floating in a garden-pool. An inflatable pillow supported my head and shoulders. A white box—a medical servo of some sort—float-ing nearby, with intravenous tubes running to my throat and elbow, and wires at-tached to disks on my chest and head. Perhaps the pool-water had been salted with something to increase its buoyancy; or maybe the gravity here was lighter than stan-dard.

  A circle of fruit trees surrounded the little pond, and terraced hedges of ferns and flowers rose up to my left and right. Beyond that was a wall. Above was not sky, but a ceiling of blue glass, criss-crossed with a trellis of lacy supports. This garden was in-doors.

  I stood up, kicked aside the box, and yanked the needles and wires away with a sweep of my arm. It hurt, but it made me feel good. Maybe I don’t like having ma-chines to whom I haven’t been properly introduced sticking their little things into me.

  At first, I thought I heard the Ship’s Voice, beautiful and feminine. “We estimate the year on Earth, correcting for relativistic effects, to be AD 12705, the One Hundred Twenty Eighth Century. Are you aware of what that implies?”

  It was my language. Or, at least, it sounded sort of familiar.

  So I turned around, stark naked, with blue pool-water still dripping from my parts, and the loveliest woman I had ever seen or imagined was walking toward me. Floating toward me, it seemed like, since her step was as graceful as a ballerina’s. She wore a dress of white, pinch-waisted to accent her figure, with an elegant long skirt swing-ing in counterpoint to the sway of her hips. Her hair was raven-black, her cheek-bones high, her lips full and red, chin delicate. Her eyes were slanted and exotic, and as green as glass.

  Her eyes held the clearest and most intelligent gaze I’d ever seen. On the other hand, they were, at the moment, the only pair of eyes I could ever remember seeing, so I guess I didn’t have much of a basis of comparison.

  A real marine would have engendered triplets on her on the spot. Me, I just stood there, dangling, wearing a dumb look on my face. Finally, I managed to say, “What the hell’s going on?”

  She smiled a half-smile, and looked at me sidelong. Did I mention how long and lush her lashes were? How green her eyes, like mirrors of emerald? “You mean, why are you still alive?” (A beautiful voice, soft and soprano, but not the voice of my Ship.)

  I nodded. It did indeed seem to be a fine question, and one well worth pondering. Why the hell was I still alive?

  “So tell me,” I said.

  A quiet smile graced her lips a moment. “We hope to reason with you. You have crossed six hundred and eight light-years from Sol; at least a thousand years have passed, Earth-time, since your launch. Whomever or whatever sent you out so far is long, long dead. Why continue this struggle? Whatever your reasons—and I’m quite sure that they were good reasons at one time—they are now defunct, meaningless. Your orders are out-of-date. And we are not your enemies; we are not monsters. Come, look!”

  So I climbed out of the pool. It was warm in the garden, and she didn’t seem to mind the way I was (or wasn’t) dressed. Maybe buck-naked was the way prisoners of war were kept, here. Or honored ambassadors and other guests of state. Or monsters from another star. Or whatever the hell I was.

  The touch of her hand on my elbow thrilled me. With delicate, nymph-like step, she moved up the little terrace-slope and past the hedge. I felt her warmth, smelled the hint of her perfume, as she stepped past me.

  The grass was cool on my bare feet, pleasant, and dew-drops from the tall ferns near the hedge touched my neck and shoulders with icy dots of shock as I pushed through them.

  She gestured to the wall beyond the trellises. A large section of wall faded into transparency.

  I was looking out an expansive window which was halfway up a cliffside. Facing it was another cliff, equally as tall, studded likewise with windows. Between the two canyon walls, a little strip of gray-blue sky showed high above. The canyon was crossed by a hundred bridges and aqueducts. Odd-looking people strolled the lanes or rolled on wheels. Some were animal-headed or were part-machine. They were slen-der and tall, almost bird-like; perhaps a side-effect of the lighter gravity. Everyone wore cloaks (or were they wings?) of muted colors, mauve, tan, blue-gray, tawny, brown.

  I stepped closer to the huge window.

  From the window, I could see a park underfoot, bright with shrubs and flowering green bushes. Several waterfalls cascaded from nearby aqueducts, formed little brooks across the lawns, and gathered at a central pool. Children frolicked in the pool. I saw a mother dangling her baby above the water, and it smiled and splashed its little toes.

  I was very conscious of the woman at my shoulder.

  She pointed at the scene. “We are the men beyond mankind; we are post-human; we have re-engineered our minds and bodies to survive the harsh conditions here on Avernus. Our minds have been restructured; we exceed old human limitations, selfishness, greed, individualism, disloyalty. Does that make us forfeit our right to live in peace? These are the people you tried to destroy. Look at them; wives and husbands, mothers and children, boys and girls. Has the force which sends you justified its evil acts to you? If so, that is an explanation we are all eager to hear.”

  “I don’t have an explanation,” I said. “You’ve medically examined me. You must know I don’t remember a damn thing.” A note of bitterness crept into my voice: “I don’t even remember who I am.”

  She nodded, looking not a bit surprised. “I will remind you. What you are, Mar-shall Lamech, is a remnant of the far past. You are the forgotten left-over of some ancient war. An unexploded bomb. A dormant virus. A relic. You come from a world long dead.

  “For forty years we watched the flare of your ship’s deceleration as you approached from deep space. We welcomed you, but your ship would not land. By radio, you accused our ancestors of some long-ago attack against the Earth. You demanded we accept you as our police and prosecutor, judge, jury, and, if need be, executioner. Yet you had no right to stand in judgment over us.

  “Then you attacked us, killing and destroying. That is fact, which no regret, no dwelling on the past can alter or ameliorate. Now we must concentrate on the fu-ture. Do you wish to have a future? We are prepared to offer you a life useful to the Collective, a role within our society, material comforts and . . . pleasures.”

  My imagination was all too eager to fill in what kind of pleasures I’d like to get from her. But I tried to keep a stony face. “Yes..? Providing . . . ?” “ . . . Providing only that you cooperate. Radio your ship, arrange a rendezvous. We wish to inspect this ship of yours. Any men, material, or technology aboard will be turned over to the Collective and used for the public good.”

  “And—just for the sake of argument—let’s say I refuse. What then?” “Pain and torment, agony and death . . . ”

  “Gee. Why am I not surprised . . . ?”

  “Not for you. I don’t know what would happen to you. But I will have failed in my mission. You must have noticed my body-form is not proper.” She gestured again at the slender, birdlike not-quite-humans gliding on the bridges and balconies outside. None of them looked like her. “I was designed for you. For your environment. I cannot live outside this museum, this terrarium. Without you, I have nothing . . . ”

  “Designed . . . ?” I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that.

  She smiled again. It was a sad, soft smil
e. “We had forty years in which to prepare. There were genetic archives, old records from the Once-Home-World.” “You are a slave?”

  “I do my duty and I obey my orders. Are we so different from each other?” When she smiled, she had dimples. “But why dwell on unpleasant things? Happiness and joy awaits all who are loyal to the principles of the Collective. But you must not delay in deciding! For, see: the Correction Instructors grow impatient!”

  I turned. Coming up the grassy slope behind us, pushing through the flowery hedges, came four tall, angular machines, like oversized preying mantises. The ro-botic carapaces were covered with thorns and hooks. Their thoraxes held turrets. Some of the weapons I recognized: rail-guns, hard-shots, flamers, neural whips. Oth-ers, I did not. Nothing looked pretty. But they were quiet as cats, and they stalked closer.

  I jerked my thumb at the approaching monsters. “So they are ‘bad cop’, I take it?” She huddled close to me, as if for support. Automatically, by instinct, I put my arm around her. It felt good. She looked up at me with her wide, green eyes, and she said in a troubled voice: “What makes you hesitate? You yourself admit that you recall nothing; if there is a reason for you to be loyal to your mission, you have forgotten it. Is there any point in dying for a forgotten cause?”

  I pushed her around behind me, put my foot on a nearby tree, and, with a grunting shrug, tore off a branch. I turned to face the approaching machines, branch held in both hand, like a club. Little green leaves floated down from my impotent impromptu weapon.

  The machines stopped and pointed their various barrels, lenses, and muzzles at me. There was a metallic snap as the lead unit jacked ammunition into its chambers. I heard the hissing ultrasonic whine of plasma-magnetics charging. With a loud clatter, gas-shells and flame cartridges slammed into gun-breaches. Little red dots from aiming lasers floated on my naked chest.

  I felt about as stupid as a man can feel.

  But, hey, the way I figured it, I’d rather fall weapon-in-hand instead of hands-up. Even if the so-called weapon is nothing but a green stick.

  “You will be led now either to a bridal chamber or a torture chamber, Marshall Lamech,” came the soft voice from behind me. I could feel her soft hand on my back, her scented breath on my ear. “Defiance is pointless, unless, of course, your goal is to ensure both our deaths. But why fight? Do you remember any reason to fight on?”

  Her other hand, no doubt, was readying some small-arm from her pocket. What was the reason I had turned my back on her again? To protect her from . . . whom? Her own allies? Her own superiors? (I think I’ve mentioned how stupid I felt just then.)

  “I need some answers first,” I said.

  A masculine voice issued from all four robots at once: “Little time remains! In a few minutes, your ship’s orbit lifts her above the here-now horizon. We do not wish your ship to have direct line-of-sight with this area; her energy-silhouette indicates a particle beam weapon is ready. We are directing radio-signal toward her, but she will not respond to us. Call! Order your ship to stand down! You need but speak aloud; we can convey your words to the broadcaster. We are all one system.”

  The Ship had told me it was OK to cooperate with these people here, provided it did not impede the mission. But did this hinder the mission? And was the cute emissary behind me right? Did I even care about the goddamn mission?

  I spoke: “Who killed the Earth?”

  I felt the breath of the girl behind me in my ear : “What does it matter? The ques-tion is entirely academic. Earth is long, long gone. And what do you care even so? You are not from Earth. The medical evidence shows that your body is only a few weeks old. You were constructed, fully grown, from genome records, during deceleration. You think you are a human being, but you are not. There are no human beings.”

  I decided I didn’t like having the girl behind me, so I stepped sideways to put her in my view. As I thought, her right hand was in her skirt pocket, clutching something heavy and rectangular.

  Unfortunately, the robot on the far right now glided forward, so that it was behind me. I didn’t like that much either.

  And it got dark. The sunlight was failing. But it was not dusk. A glance at the win-dow showed that some roof or blast-panels were sliding over top of the canyon out-side, closing all the city under a giant lid. I saw people rushing, but no panic, no show of emotion, except that some of the babies in the park were crying. What was odd about the scene was that all the people were in step. They were marching double-time but they were clearly in step, all being controlled by one mind, one will.

  Like a chorus, four copies of the same masculine voice came from the robots: “The decision horizon reaches unity! The unintegrated organism known as Lamech must proffer cooperation behavior! Order your ship into close orbit, weapons stand down, shut off reaction drive, open airlocks, prepare to be boarded. This course of behavior leads to reward! All other courses lead to corrective penalty! Speak now!”

  The girl spoke softly, her green eyes looking deeply into mine as she swayed for-ward. “If you are not a human being, what would it matter to you if the home planet of the human beings had been destroyed? Besides, there is nothing you can do about any of that now. That issue is dead. A thousand years dead. Only your life matters now. Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?” Then, more softly, she whispered: “It matters to me, if not to you.”

  But I noticed she did not step between me and the mantis-robots. In fact, they were both in motion, she daintily stepping forward, eyes soft and pleading, and perhaps a trifle afraid for me; and them, creeping catlike on their twitching spider-legs, gun-barrels and projectors swinging to track me, fanning left and right to cover possible avenues of escape.

  Funny how they stepped that way. It was little things that attracted my attention, such as how her head moved ever so slightly to the left while the upper launcher from the killer-robot nearest her slid ever so slightly to the right, so that spent shellcasings from its ejectors would not graze her hair once it started firing. Very smooth. All choreographed.

  All controlled by one will.

  I said, “I don’t believe you.”

  She said, “Ask your ship. Talk to it. Simply speak out loud.” “Ship! Are you there?”

  I counted. One Mississippi, Two Mississippi. Then, the beautiful, beautiful Voice of the Ship answered, as placid and perfect as only unliving voices can be: “Message received. This line is not secure. Switching to encryption. Please confirm if you under-stand me.” This last group of words was somehow different, but I still understood them.

  About two seconds delay between signal and response. So that ship was roughly 186,000 miles away. Rather high for a firing orbit. The bad guys implied she had opened her weapon-parasol, and powered her particle-beam weapons. Was she going to fire a directed energy beam from that far away? Through the atmosphere?

  “I understand you,” I said, and the way the words came out hurt my throat.

  Really, I understood almost nothing that was going on in this whole mess. But I did understand that the Ship was preparing a volley against satellite targets, some-thing in high orbit, near her. Otherwise, her posture did not make sense. The target satellite had to be emerging from what was (relative to the ship) the planet’s commu-nication shadow.

  I noticed the cute emissary had taken her hand out of her pocket and was holding her ears.

  I said, “Give present target orbital elements.”

  That was when I realized that what was coming out of my mouth was not words; it was some sort of strident whining noise, a mathematical set of hiccup and shrills. It sounded terrible.

  The Ship: “Requested information cannot be broadcast on non-secure channels. Switching to secure channel . . . ”

  The noise of the Ship’s Voice coming out of the speakers was the same hiccups and shrieks. An encryption. The bad guys were passing it back and forth between us, but I doubted that they could decipher it.

  They must have doubted it too. Maybe they had given it a try, and given u
p, for then they said (all four in unison, just like a boy’s choir:) “Interrupt! Private communication is selfish, irregular, impermissible! Unadapted Lamech-entity continues to conspire against the Unity! His actions do not conform!”

  The girl put her hand back in her pocket, now that I wasn’t making an ear-split-ting squeal. She said to me, “What were you talking about with your ship? Did you ask her whether you were human? Did you ask her why you were here?”

  The robot-quartet chimed in: “Consult with central dogma! Formulate a dangerassessment of Marshall Lamech’s character, extrapolate, react! Awaiting verdict.” The girl flushed. She looked actually angry or upset. “Wait, masters, I beg you! He may still be willing to help us! Give him time to think! Stop treating him like the enemy; he is as much a victim here as we are!”

  The robot crew actually stepped back. Certain weapons were holstered; others powered down. I heard the ticking of the energy-direction barrels cooling, the whine of multiguns going into standby-cycles.

  Was that supposed to reassure me?

  She turned back to me. “Please! There are more lives involved here than just yours! You’ve got to believe us! We are not your foes, how could we be? Whatever happened to Earth happened thousands of years before we were born!”

  I saw how her eyes glittered; she seemed about to weep; and her bosom heaved with passion, her cheeks were blushed with fear.

  Good acting. I almost bought it. Almost.

  I wondered were they had gotten the algorithm to mimic human body language, nuances of gesture. I wondered how, just working with mathematical code and old records, they had been able to match up specific gestures with specific emotions. The sheer genius of it was even more impressive if you figured they did not know what “emotions” were anymore, not really; they must have been judging states of mind by statistical analysis.

  They? I should say ‘it.’ It seemed to be one system.