Two of the bots had exited the building and were outside exploring at ground level, each with many bright lamps lighting up the night. As I watched, the lamps started breaking away from the bots, floating under their own power to separate locations to spread the light around and get a wider field of view. Outside this side of the apartment was an open area, a road intersection and a wide square. Beyond that was what must once have been a park. But no more… we could see that the trees, grass, weeds had all run riot. The trees grew up to the canopy; the weeds, probably mostly dead, seemed to fill the spaces between the tree trunks. It was a vast mass of plant matter. Fortunately, we couldn’t smell a thing, what with the suits; be damned if I was going to crack the thing open to take a sniff. Sarah, I think, knew what I was thinking… always wondered a bit about her in that regard. Anyway, she asked George what the air was like down there. Oxygen was up around thirty-five percent but pressure wasn’t up appreciably. A lot of oxygen had been added to the air, and a lot of nitrogen taken out. Carbon dioxide was nil, and it stank of rotting vegetation. Pollen was through the roof; humidity was near eighty percent. Organic compounds from simple to really complex filled the air down there. And it was silent: there were bugs in the canopy, but not much of anything down below. And with no rotation, the natural cycles that kept air circulating in the habitat had ceased. No wind, not even a breeze, above the canopy… and absolutely nothing moving down below. Even dust in the air had ground to a halt.
Even so, Sarah and I felt sure that something was out there. Just that feeling, you know? Like you’re being watched. But the bots had spread themselves all over hell and gone out there, said there was nothing. Still, I found that I had my pistol in my hand. I never remembered actually pulling it out of the holster, but there it was. So I put it back. I told George to keep an eye on the park. For once, he didn’t give a rude answer, he just did it. You could tell that George was busy concentrating when he was businesslike. Being a dick takes effort, I guess.
Sarah suddenly noticed that the silence was really silent. As in, no Cranston yelling and screaming. I figured he’d finally settled down; Sarah and I left the apartment to go find him. Imagine how thrilled we were to find his suit — with him not in it — floating like a splayed jellyfish in the hallway. “Shit,” I said. I’m eloquent like that. Without his suit, we couldn’t track him unless we saw him.
Sarah asked George if he knew where Cranston was. He said no… then a few seconds later said yes. Sent images to our faceplates taken from one of the bot-cams floating outside showing Cranston launching himself out of one of the ground-level main doors, heading towards the park. He had gone beyond raving; he was flat-out nuts. He’d torn most of his clothes off; the look on his face bore little relationship to what you’d expect from a sane human. He flew at a pretty good clip across the road, across the square, and smack into one of the trees. Didn’t even faze him… he just crawled around it and shot into the woods. Sarah and I flew back to the open window; by then he was gone from sight. The separated bot-lamps and bot-cams flew of their own accord into the woods, chasing him. A few sharp and moving shadows were cast as the lights passed into the woods, then it was all black.
One of the bot-lamps, with a bot-cam in tow, almost caught up with Cranston. He was incredibly fast in among the trees and weeds; the bots could barely keep up. He was just a light shape in the dark. You’d get a glimpse of him, then he was gone again. This went on for a minute and a half or so… then… hmm. How to say it. Well, things got worse.
The leading bot-cam and bot-lamp caught up with him, the lamp first. He’d stopped dead in his tracks, as it were. He was floating vertically between a pair of trees, a bunch of crap — twigs and old dead leaves and dirt and rocks and such — floating around him. The bot-lamp was maybe two meters off to the side of him, the camera maybe seven or eight meters behind, moving in. I think he was looking up at something, though it was hard to tell from behind. He was still yammering, crazy stuff. Only thing he said that didn’t sound like gibberish was “I told them,” whatever that meant.
Couldn’t see what he was looking at; the lamp was shining at him from the side. But… the darkness in front of him… it fell on him. Best way I can describe it. The darkness fell on him. Took out the lamp, too. Later when we could play the video back in slow motion, the darkness was like a wall of translucent black goo; the lamp lit a bit of it just as it fell on the guy. There was an audible “splat.” I don’t know whether it was the darkness that went splat, or Cranston… in either case, Cranston never made another sound.
After the lamp got taken out the bot-cam switched to infra-red. All it could see was a vague something ahead of it. And when it flew closer, there was a blur of motion and it was gone too. According to George, it was destroyed, or at least turned off or its transmissions completely blocked. The following bots-cams and bot-lamps slowed, but continued forwards… and they too started getting taken out when they approached where Cranston had been. Then the bots stopped… and they continued to get eliminated, in a pattern moving towards us. Oh shit, you’d think I would’ve said. But no, it was actually Sarah. What I said was that we gotta go.
“What about Cranston? Should we look for him?” Sarah was, as I’d said, the humanitarian.
“Fuck that noise. The man’s dead.” As I’d said, I’m not so much the humanitarian. Right then I really wanted that tactical nuke that Sarah would never let me bring. I was thinking that those woods would look spectacular repainted in “combustion orange;” based on the rapidly decreasing supply of bot-cams, whatever it was out there in the woods was getting closer.
“George,” I said, “Get us the hell out of here.” The fanpacks flipped open and roared to life, full power; even with an incredibly efficient AI controlling them, Sarah and I used hands and feet to bounce off walls and pull ourselves along handrails to get up the stairwell. I was sure I could hear something very big making “squish” noises near the bottom of the building. There were no more surviving bits of the bots outside the building.
We flew out the rooftop door towards the tunnel in the foliage, but the tunnel had already started to close back up. The plants were greedy for every little bit of real estate. Without the bots to serve as weed whackers, it was up to me… more specifically, it was up to my omnigun. Sarah had thought me odd for buying that admittedly ridiculous-looking weapon, but I didn’t hear her complain when I used it to lob a grenade into the foliage. It blew a fair — but incomplete - hole in the canopy; a flip of a switch brought the flame thrower online, and a quick blast set the whole canopy aflame. The high oxygen content turned the fire into a massive conflagration over our heads; but in our suits, which would allow us to walk around on Mercury at noon, who cared? The fanpacks blasted us through the thinnest, weakest part of the burning canopy. And we were out, back in the sky. George hovered us for a second, to make sure that we were intact and nothing was on fire, then he started us upwards again. I couldn’t wait to rattle around in the elevator again.
Suddenly the fanpacks roared to full emergency thrust, launching us up like cannonshots. I couldn’t help but look down. The canopy was blazing over a diameter of fifty, sixty meters, that weird, pulsing sort of fire you get in zero-g… and was bulging upwards. Something underneath it was big and trying to push upwards; George had seen this and accelerated us at full power to get away from it. The whole flaming bit of the canopy was pushed upwards. I don’t know what it was, but I do know I emptied the omnigun into it… grenades, slugs, needles, everything that gun packed except for flame, which was out of range already. That just seemed to piss off whatever was down there. I swear, this ain’t no bullshit, a whip or a vine or something shot out at me. I was more than a hundred meters up, and I saw the whip shoot along past me, over my head, missed my by three, four meters. Waved around ovearhead, making George back off on the upward flight. Black, kinda slick, wet looking thing. Thick as my arm. All the omnigun had left was a quick shot of flame, which didn’t seem to do squat to the thing. I dropped it, unslung the shotgun and started pumping tungsten buckshot into it, blew wet squishy chunks off it. It seemed to notice that, pulled back a bit, enough so that I got past it. The whip missed and fell back down into the flames. Whatever was down there seemed to sorta settle back down; the flaming canopy collapsed, leaving a dark hole. You could see the apartment building; the roof had caved in.