Urban’s skin suit confirmed it. “Uplink lost,” it informed him.
“Go back,” Urban ordered. “Recover the link.”
*What are you going to do?
“I’m going on.”
*Urban—
“Just go!”
He slapped the wall. Shot downward. He wanted to know what they’d found. He wanted video of it to send back to Elepaio.
As he neared the bottom, his tether morphed to slow his descent. His light illuminated a fan-shaped slice of the deck and sparkled against the gray glass that shingled the nearest of the massive cubes.
He looked for the upside-down glass man, but did not see him.
A red light popped on in the periphery of his vision. His skin suit spoke again, informing him in a calm voice, “Suit integrity is under threat.” Urban sucked in a sharp breath. That meant he was under attack but not with a weapon he could directly perceive. The assault was taking place on a molecular scale.
A moment later, the suit spoke again, announcing the failure of Urban’s molecular defenses: “Suit integrity has been compromised.”
Foreign nanomachines had fought past the skin suit’s defenses, breaching it, opening microscopic channels through its fabric. He felt the results as needles of cold that stabbed into his hands, his chest, his eyes.
Only for a moment.
The cold subsided as the suit self-repaired, but the enemy was already inside. Urban cried out as searing heat erupted at the points where his suit had been penetrated. His vision clouded. A battle was being fought across the moist surfaces of his eyes, as well as against the skin of his chest and hands—his defensive Makers against the intruding nanotech.
He clenched his fists against the pain and when, after a few seconds, the pain failed to subside, he knew he had lost. His defensive Makers had failed to protect him, leaving him at the mercy of whatever it was that existed down here.
Urban did not trust the mercy of alien lifeforms.
The pain in his eyes sharpened. He envisioned the attacking nanomachines driving deeper into his head. Soon they would reach his brain, his atrium. God knows what would happen then.
He wasn’t going to let it happen. He wasn’t going to leave any meaningful data for this lifeform to exploit.
No time to prepare a ghost.
Just end it.
“Riffan!” he shouted, hoping his comms still worked. “We’re terminating!”
*What? No! I’m still trying to recover the link.
A memory, searing across Urban’s consciousness: the first time he’d had to terminate. He’d been dying, but still so hard to do. He’d known Riffan wouldn’t be up to it, not without hesitation. So on the way in he’d hacked Riffan’s avatar, setting up a code word that would kick off the termination sequence for both of them. He spoke it.
*No! Riffan screamed.
But the process was already underway. Hosts of Makers erupted from the tendrils of their atriums, replicating madly, consuming brain tissue to do it, converting the content of their skulls into gray goo, devoid of information.
Contact had been lost with the avatars and with scout-bots one and two—the pair that had entered the shipwreck—but Elepaio remained in contact with the probe. Data was still being received. The scout-bots assigned to explore the shipwreck’s hull were still active, while the probe’s cameras continued to watch both the wreck and the planetoid below.
Urban felt a submind drop in. It melded with his ghost, bringing him the knowledge that there was now activity on the planetoid’s surface.
He turned to examine a continuously updating three-dimensional projection of the Rock that floated in the virtual space of Elepaio’s library. All its cracks and craters had been carefully mapped, but that map was now being revised as the seemingly lifeless surface began to change.
The latest images showed black circles that had not been observed before. The features appeared at high points on the planet’s scarred surface: the rims of craters, the peaks of low, folded hills. Perfect circles of darkness. Urban counted ten, then fifteen, then twenty of them. No pattern in their arrangement.
They looked like tiny spots on the face of this little world, but the scale showed them to be at least five hundred meters across. He suspected they were pits, holes in the ground, missile silos maybe. If so, they were huge.
More appeared as the probe continued to advance in its slow orbit, collecting fresh images of the surface.
Urban realized Riffan was now hovering beside him. “Corruption take us,” he whispered. “And chaos too.”
“It’s definitely awake now,” Urban said. “Whatever it is.”
“Let’s see it in infrared.”
The library obliged and each circle shifted from black to blazing white. “Subterranean network,” Riffan said. “Got to be. Significantly warm. Maybe a fusion power source. Impressive how little of that interior heat we were able to detect before the doors opened.”
“Skilled at playing dead,” Urban agreed.
The circles began to pulse, growing briefly brighter—not synchronized, not flaring everywhere at once, not flaring in a discernible pattern—but repeatedly.
“A weapon?” Riffan wondered.
“Not enough power there to harm us.”
“A code?”
“Meant for who?”
Riffan shook his head. “Possible to get scout-bots down there?”
“No. They’ve all been deployed.”
The probe continued its orbital survey but found no more openings. The region below it now appeared to be the same unmarked, lifeless surface they’d first seen.
“Hey,” Riffan said suspiciously. “What’s going on? Do you think there’s no activity in this region?”
“Or is the activity already over with?” Urban asked. “Did silos open here too, but close before we could record them?”
He wanted to do the impossible: Turn the probe around, look again at the area just surveyed, determine if the openings they’d seen were still there. But by the time the probe could survey that region again, they’d be out of communications range.
He turned an uneasy gaze back to the library window that held the latest image of the shipwreck, but there was nothing new to see there.
“Damn,” he whispered, angry because he might never figure out what had just happened.
The voice of a DI interrupted his brooding thoughts. “Contact reestablished with scout-bot one,” it announced. “Current transmission is voice only.”
“It’s recovered,” Riffan whispered in wonder. “Maybe—”
Urban cut him off with a slashing gesture. “It’s not the scout-bot. The scout-bot doesn’t have a voice.” But something was there at the Rock. It had caused him to lose the avatars, it had taken his scout-bots, and now it was playing with him.
A new image of the shipwreck posted. The wreck appeared the same, but the figure of a man could now be seen standing on the ruptured hull, just outside of the torn, frozen tissue surrounding the fissure.
The man was not him. It was not Riffan.
In all likelihood it was also not a man because he was standing naked on the hull without the benefit of a skin suit. Scale was hard to gauge, but Urban guessed him to be of moderate human height. A lean but muscular build, black hair adrift in the zero gravity, his complexion seeming dark in the dim light. His eyes were dark too, cast in shadow as he looked back at the watching probe—which made it feel as if he was looking Urban in the eyes.