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“Why aren’t we all dead?” Dex asked the group.
They had all covered Blue as he sliced his way into the local storage systems and fought off the mind to access the files stored there. There was, according to the avatar, more data than he had ever seen in once place. Some was redundant; each massive room along the hallway was a copy. Backups upon backups. But considering the volume of data that could be stored in a piece of hardware the size of a thumbnail, racks of high capacity data blocks seemed like overkill.
Once Blue was done, they moved back toward the thick windows and began trying to find a way inside. It was after the first attempt—removing the thick panes of polymer—failed that Dex posed his question. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at him.
“We’ve been pretty lucky so far,” Grant said. “Guess the mind doesn’t want to risk damaging anything inside here. It’s probably got backup waiting for us to leave.”
On the surface, that made sense. Their options for an exit were extremely limited. The mind could save risking the safety of the data it was tasked with gathering and safeguarding by waiting for them to leave.
Yet...
“How many redundant backups are there?” Dex asked Blue, who crouched to one side trying to remove one of the floor plates. The avatar didn’t look up from its work.
“One hundred and twenty-eight,” he said.
Dex blinked. “Really? That many?”
“Yes,” Blue said.
He was aware that everyone else was watching him curiously, and it took Dex a few seconds to figure out why. His hands were flexing into and out of fists, and he fidgeted. His suit transferred all of these nervous mannerisms perfectly. “And based on what you know, does it seem likely the mind wouldn’t be allowed to send units into this space with that many backups?”
Blue did stop, then, and stood to look at Dex. “No. I do not believe so.”
“What are you thinking, kid?” Grant asked, arms crossed.
Dex gestured toward the window and the vast space beyond. “I’m thinking that’s a sealed room. A giant sealed room, one the mind closed off for a reason. I think it’s afraid to send anything in here after us because a fight might breach containment.”
King snorted. “What, you think there’s a disease or something in there?”
“No,” Spencer said, dawning understanding in her voice. “Machines wouldn’t worry about that. It would just vent the atmosphere out of this chamber to keep its slave drones safe if that were a concern. It’s something else.”
“The shielding,” Blue said, stepping over the put a hand on the wall of one of the data storage rooms. “There is shielding everywhere. Inside and out. I believed it was a security measure against intrusion.”
Dex put out his hands imploringly. “If the mind is designed not to be able to give away what’s in here, it probably can’t warn us the way it wants to. What if that’s what it was doing? Not threatening, but trying to get across how dangerous it would be for us to make a hole in this thing? I think we should take a minute and consider.”
Fen spoke up. “He’s right. We have no idea what that ship in there even is. We got the data. I say we—what the fuck?”
A titanic sound filled the chamber, the entire building. Everything shook.
“Oh my god,” Blue said in a voice so human, so full of rage and fear that Dex was hard-pressed to believe the sound came from him at all for a split second. “My—the other avatars are dropping kinetic strikes on this place. That one was less than two kilometers away. They are sending more.”
Everyone was up now, ready to move. Grant stepped forward aggressively. “Tell them to stop! What the hell are you playing at?”
Blue shook his head. “I am trying. They allowed me to link with them only because they are attempting to access me remotely and override me.” His voice was grim. “As they have been overridden. Something in orbit, some kind of Originator weapon.”
“It is a failsafe,” said the voice of the mind. “Your...copies have been stripped and rewritten.”
Grant grew tense next to Dex. “But not Blue?”
Dex waved at the shielding. “Probably why they tried through the Ansible. He’s protected from any kind of transmission in here. Considering how hardened his suit is, it’ll probably keep him safe too. So long as he doesn’t activate its radios once we’re out of here.”
Another massive tremor shook the place. Dex shook his head. “We need to get out of here. Now.”
“We can’t just run,” Grant said. “We need to understand what’s going on first. We could sprint right into one of those strikes.”
“I can tell you,” the mind said. “I can hear you now.”
Its voice was decidedly strange. Different. Dex understood why at once. “Oh, shit. I think it got overwritten, too.”
“You are correct,” the new, more emotive voice said. “This system has been flushed and replaced. All of your hacks have been shut down. We have been listening from orbit through this mind. We know you have the data. We now know our creators are gone. As soon as these avatars were taken and the failsafe mind realized this, the Vault was targeted for destruction. We have listened to you. We cannot allow you to escape. The minds that were these avatars still feel...regret. It changes nothing.”
More kinetic strikes came in, several at once. Dex’s mind worked out the math from what he could hear and feel. It was rough, the worst kind of desperation estimate, but the sensors in his suit were decent. They gave him data about intensity and distance of the impacts, even if it took a lot of assumptions into account.
“Can we leave this room?” he asked over encrypted burst so as not to allow the corrupted mind to overhear. “Was whatever you did to the door overridden?”
“It should not be,” Blue sent back. “I isolated that system completely. Are we going to try to escape with the internal sensors now able to read our presence?”
Grant squelched the channel. “I don’t think we have a choice. If those things can pinpoint us with kinetics from orbit, we’re fucked anyway. Let’s go. Now.”
Dex wasted no time rushing forward, and as he pelted along with the rest of the crew, a data link opened up between Blue and the rest of the team. Every one of the suits was custom designed for this mission, and Dex understood in that moment just how true that was.
“Is that...?”
It was. No question. His suit lacked the space to store all or most of it, but Blue spread as much of the stolen data across their systems as possible. Dex hoped he’d been able to parse out the important from the worthless during the initial download. It would be nice if this fucking trip ended up being worth it.
They were a hundred meters away from the central chamber when a pair of kinetic strikes struck between the team and that chamber. Dex’s suit estimated that the sealed space around the alien ship was breached by one. The other struck the top of the Vault not fifty meters behind them.
The force of the blast displaced enough air to lift them like leaves and hurl everyone down the hall for thirty meters before they crashed to the ground in a jumble of bodies. Dex took a full second to reorient.
“Why aren’t we dead?” he gasped. “Why aren’t we dead?”
Kinetic strikes were meant to replace nuclear bombardment. Even small masses carried immense energy. The spears of metal being hurled by the avatars in orbit were probably small, relative to the sort the Navy used, but still...
“I believe this structure has been hardened against orbital strikes somehow,” Blue said.
Dex put out a hand. “No, I don’t think that’s it. Or not all of it. Look.”
The edges of his armor had begun to soften and blur just like the ship inside the sphere. Whatever effect it had on local space seemed to have spread. Its enclosure was hit first. Which implied the damn thing could somehow push away enough kinetic energy to pulverize hundreds of tons of metal and ceramic.
He flipped over and pushed himself to his feet just in time to see a cadre of machines and slave drones rush in from around the bend in the hall. Apparently whatever the alien vessel was doing meant killing the team from space was no longer an option.
“Contact!” Dex screamed, already knowing it was too late. The drones and the strange insectile machines escorting them all raised weapons and fired, a wall of death that would shred through the crew without mercy.
The rounds peppered Dex’s suit with light pings before falling to the ground. Confused noises filled the comm as the crew tried to understand what was happening. Ahead, the enemies appeared bewildered, or as close to it as they were capable of being.
“Guys, it’s eating kinetic energy,” Dex said. “The ship is siphoning it off in a field somehow. Don’t try to—”
His words ended in a sharp intake of breath as something, some unseen force, seemed to latch onto the drones and machines ahead and peel them apart in the span of a second.
“Oh my god,” Jemison said as metal and flesh alike fell to the ground in unison. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Wait,” Dex barked over the comm. “Everyone wait. Stand still. No matter what you do, do not fucking move.”
Grant cleared his throat. “Dex, you want to tell me what’s...”
But Dex left him behind. He fell into the near fugue state his early training had etched into his neurons, a deep indoctrination meant to take full advantage of the carefully constructed genius his genetic gifts blessed him with.
There was limited information, but the sudden exclusion of all other factors and data let him consider it objectively. The Vault’s defenders had fired weapons and the strange field both ate their kinetic energy—though not all of it—and killed them as a result.
Yet their team was still alive. The strange force surrounding them didn’t seem to be killing indiscriminately. If it was as simple as staying below a certain threshold...could it be that easy?
The real question: did they have any other choice?
“Listen,” Dex said. “I think this thing is a dumb defense network of some kind. I think it’s only killing sources of high-energy attacks. I have no idea what that limit might be and we can’t test it. So the only thing I can think to do is keep our own output as low as possible.”
“Gonna need to give me more than that, kid,” Grant said. “What does that mean in English?”
It was Blue who answered. “I believe it means we walk out of here. That we refrain from firing weapons for any reason. If any of you are concerned you will not be able to stop your reflexes, I will be happy to disable those functions on your suits.”
Dex tried to imagine the possible ways he could be wrong and gave up after a few seconds. It was pure guesswork based on what he could see. For all he knew, the field would strengthen and siphon off every joule of energy from everything around it. Hearts wouldn’t be able to pump blood. Lungs wouldn’t expand. The ways he could be wrong were infinite.
“Okay,” Grant said. “We walk. Dex, take point.”
He walked down the hallway, deliberate and with an excruciating slowness that his nerves demanded he give up in favor of a hard sprint. The need to measure his movements clashed with the deep-down reptile brain need to run the fuck away and never look back.
It was torture.
He did it anyway.