The Machine Awakes E-Book

Adam Christopher

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In this far future space opera set in the Spider War universe of The Burning Dark, a government agent uncovers a conspiracy that stretches from the slums of Salt City to the floating gas mines of Jupiter. There, deep in the roiling clouds of the planet, the Jovian Mining Corporation is hiding a secret that will tear the Fleet apart. But there is something else hiding in Jovian system. Something insidious, intelligent and hungry. The Spiders are near.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Praise for The Burning Dark

Also by Adam Christopher

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

God is a Number

The Battle of Warworld 4114

Part One: Earth

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

Into the Darkest Night

Part Two: Jupiter

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

Plausible Deniability

Part Three: 879122-Juno-Juno

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PRAISE FOR THE BURNING DARK

“This dark and chilling novel from the versatile Adam Christopher builds tension expertly. Claustrophobic in mood but with the scope of great space opera, this is SF you will want to read with the light on.”Library Journal, starred review

“An exciting novel from an exciting new voice in SF.” Booklist

“The novel is studded with memorable imagery… What lingers at the end of The Burning Dark is the deeply uncanny quality of a haunted, abandoned space station – claustrophobic, and yet large enough to be lost in – and a final sequence of revelations that pay off the tension handsomely.” SFX

“The building tension and mounting paranoia is expertly realised by Christopher… Wonderfully sinister.” Starburst

“Great edge-of-your-seat stuff.” The Book Plank

“With The Burning Dark, Christopher has produced a widescreen Hollywood spectacular in novel form, littered with ‘wow’ moments and a few sly in-jokes for hardcore comic book fans to catch. Not to be missed.”James Lovegrove, New York Times bestselling author of the Pantheon series

“A creepy mystery embedded in a classic sci-fi setting that’ll make you shiver…” Tobias S. Buckell, New York Times bestselling author of Halo: The Cole Protocol

“Christopher puts sci-fi in a metaphysical choke-hold—The Burning Dark makes reality tap out.”Scott Sigler, New York Times bestselling author of Contagious

“A riveting sci-fi mystery reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’sThe Haunting of Hill House.” Martha Wells, author of Star Wars:Empire and Rebellion—Razor’s Edge

“Smart, intricate, and viscerally gripping…Adam Christopher carves a place for himself among the stars of his genre.” V.E. Schwab, author of Vicious and A Darker Shade of Magic

“Christopher mines the terror of a setting that feels both tremendously vast and nerve-wrackingly claustrophobic. The Burning Dark will have readers hesitating before glancing at the night sky or turning on their radios.”Robert Jackson Bennett, author of Mr. Shivers and American Elsewhere

“With this creepy and compelling mystery, Adam Christopher demonstrates why he’s one of the most original and exciting writers working in the genre right now.”Gareth L. Powell, author of Ack-Ack Macaque and The Recollection

“Christopher is writing science-fiction unlike anyone else—tense, unsettling, and grounded in a universe full of danger and mystery. The Burning Dark slips a cold, gloved hand around your heart and doesn’t let go.”Jen Williams, author of The Copper Promise

Also available from Adam Christopher and Titan Books

THE SPIDER WARSThe Burning DarkThe Dead Stars (April 2016)

THE LA TRILOGYMade to Kill (November 2015)

ELEMENTARYThe Ghost Line

The Machine AwakesPrint edition ISBN: 9781783292035E-book edition ISBN: 9781783292042

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: March 20152 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2015 by Seven Wonders Limited. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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For Sandra

GOD IS A NUMBER

“Goddamn it, I’m good!”

Chief Mining Engineer Ramin Klaus clicked his tongue and sat back in his chair. Stretching his arms, he interlocked his fingers behind his head and gave the planetary projection in front of him a satisfied nod. Pay dirt. Big time.

Around him, the usual quiet efficiency that characterized the huge circular control room of the Jovian Mining Corporation’s refinery was broken by a smattering of applause and even an enthusiastic whistle. Two dozen mining engineers, clad in the high-collared magenta uniforms of JMC technical crew, were seated around the planetary projection in two long, curving, semicircular consoles. In the center of the minimal, white chamber was the planetary projection of Jupiter itself, a photoreal holographic sphere, ten meters across and filling the control room with swirling orange and red light.

Klaus accepted the congratulations of his colleagues as he watched the slowly rotating bands of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Jupiter’s rich, rich atmosphere. Holy crap, the bonus on this storm alone was going to be enough to pay off his indentured contract with the JMC. Klaus clicked his tongue again and let his sprung chair push him forward as he reached for his keyboard. A few taps later and the storm—a bluish oval a quarter the size of Jupiter’s famous red spot, slowly sliding clockwise around the planet’s upper latitudes—was outlined on the projection with a yellow computer overlay. Another tap, and a series of red lines were drawn—vectors from a scattering of bright green triangular icons that were spread out across the side of the planet facing Klaus’s console. Klaus sat in the center of his row; on either side, the other engineers got back to work, murmuring into their comms as they studied their own holodisplays floating above each station.

Storm identified, vectors plotted, it was time to get to work. Klaus tapped at his controls, and hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, fifty of the largest robotic mining platforms—the Sigmas—changed course.

The JMC refinery floated in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, at a zone where the external pressure was more or less Earth-normal, and the atmosphere, while still turbulent, was much more stable than the deeper levels. The Sigmas, each a factory bigger than the city-sized refinery itself, floated at varying depths according to need, their fully autonomous AIs programmed to search for and extract the richest belts of gas, processing the valuable product and sending it in solid, frozen shipments up to the refinery by automated cargo drone. At the refinery, the gas was further processed, the more exotic trace elements separated, and the product shipped out to the miniature planetary system of Jupiter’s moons. There, safely out of the Jovian atmosphere, the JMC ran one of the biggest logistics operations in Fleetspace, packaging the product for sale to their primary customer: the Fleet.

Seated on Klaus’s left, junior engineer Parker frowned, his hand held against the side of his head as he listened to something on his comms.

Klaus turned in his chair toward his colleague. “Everything okay?”

Parker nodded, but the frown remained plastered to his face. “Yes, sir … just …” He tapped at his console and squinted at his holodisplay. “Just an echo off of something. Sigmas Five and Forty are bouncing a transmission between each other.”

Klaus shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. This the first time you’ve been storm chasing?”

Parker’s frown melted into a smile. Good lad, thought Klaus. The young man was no doubt thinking about his storm bonus. As they all should be.

“Right,” said Klaus. He pointed to the planetary projection, to the green icons representing the Sigma mines as they slowly tracked toward the new storm. “The mines will coordinate between themselves for maximum efficiency. Storm like this, don’t be surprised if you hear all kinds of chatter from them. They might even reconfigure their superstructures for maximum extraction.”

“Eavesdropping on the mines again?”

Klaus and Parker both turned in their chairs, looking up to the high, railed gallery that ringed the control center. There a man leaned on the railing, looking down on the control center. “I’m not sure they like that, mister.” Then he grinned broadly.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir,” said Klaus. He glanced sideways at Parker, who visibly gulped, then turned back to his station. Klaus laughed and looked back up at his boss. “All under control.”

“Glad to hear it,” said the refinery controller. “Send me a full storm projection for review, will you?”

“That’s an affirmative, sir.”

The executive tapped the gallery rail with the large ring on his right hand, the sound echoing across the control chamber. The gallery was dark—intentionally so, allowing visitors to observe the workings of the refinery control center without disturbing the engineers—but the exec was lit up in the reds and yellows of the huge Jupiter projection, his teeth and eyes glinting as he nodded. He tapped the rail with his ring again, then turned and vanished into the shadows.

Klaus spun his chair around. “Okay,” he said, addressing everyone seated around the room. “You heard the boss. I want a full storm projection. Duration, yields, profit margins, the works. Get to it, folks.”

There was a murmur of acknowledgment from around the room as the engineers hunched over their stations, compiling the individual reports that Klaus would then check and assemble into a single document for the refinery controller.

Next to him, Parker pursed his lips.

Klaus raised an eyebrow. “Yes, Mr. Parker?”

“Are the mines okay?” he asked. He pulled at the earpiece in his left ear. “There seems to be a lot of something going on.”

Klaus shook his head. “That’s normal, engineer, like I said. Turn off your comms, and pull up your projects for the executive report.”

“Yes, sir.”

As Parker turned back to his console, Klaus allowed himself a small smile. Ah, was he ever as young as that? Maybe he had been. He couldn’t really remember. And maybe one day young Parker would be in his chair, as chief mining engineer on a JMC refinery.

But, in the meantime, they had a storm to catch.

* * *

An hour later, the chief engineer stood in front of the controller’s desk in the plush management office. Like the rest of the refinery, the décor was in corporate colors—all muted purples and white—but Klaus had to admit that he didn’t really like it. There was a clinical, almost medical atmosphere in the office.

Which, if he was honest, befitted its occupant.

His boss sat behind a smoked glass desk, dressed in the same magenta as the engineers. But instead of the pseudo-military tunic of the workers, his suit was an elegant designer piece, with a crisp high-buttoned shirt of the same color beneath the jacket. His steel gray hair, brushed back into a high pompadour, matched his eyes, which were small and hard. True, he was pleasant enough, but he represented a class of company employee existing in the rarified echelons of the JMC board that Klaus couldn’t really identify with. As the executive tapped at his datapad, Klaus saw he was wearing cufflinks studded with red gems as big as his thumbnail. Klaus might have had a comfortable job in the controlled environment of the JMC refinery today, but he was a starminer through and through. He’d started his career digging herculanium ore out of slowrocks with nothing but a plasma pick, his thin spacesuit the only protection from the vacuum of space as he worked on one airless, low-gravity asteroid after another. But while his JMC boss knew his stuff, Klaus couldn’t really picture him in the cramped confines of a mining ship, studying stellar mineralogy charts, plotting his course from one belt to the next.

Of course, that life was so long ago for Klaus that he couldn’t even remember when he’d won the position at the JMC. Must have been, oh—

“Hmm.”

The executive frowned, drawing a manicured finger over his top lip as he studied the report. Neither of them had spoken for some minutes. Klaus, snapping out of his reverie, rubbed the skin under one eye as he returned his thoughts to the problem at hand, running some possible explanations—and solutions—through his mind.

It seemed that Parker had been right. Two of the Sigma platforms were bouncing a signal between them, but after running diagnostics, Parker found that neither mine was acknowledging the other. Parker, on his own initiative, had drilled deeper into the status logs and discovered that the data stream from Sigmas Five and Forty—coincidentally, two of the very deepest of the Jovian gas mines—had been choppy for three cycles now. That wasn’t necessarily a problem, or even unexpected, Klaus knew that. As he had explained to Parker, so far down in Jupiter’s cloud deck conditions were difficult, to say the least. Besides the colossal atmospheric pressure and temperature—not to mention the frankly insane meteorology—there was electromagnetic radiation. A boatload of it, generated by electrical activity in the very storms the robotic platforms were supposed to mine.

And sure, the platforms were shielded and the communications network that linked the robots together, and the refinery to the robots, had enough automatic error correction to compensate. But this storm? Well, it was something special, a once-in-a-lifetime event that had brewed deep in the soupy layers of the planet before rising to the surface. The level of data loss was huge, although the JMC’s central AI hadn’t flagged it, content instead to let the mines—each an extension of the JMC AI anyway—get on with their jobs. Each giant mine was designed not only to overcome any routine problem on its own, but even to devise new techniques and methods, designing its own improved platform systems and using its factories to reconfigure their very own structures. Sometimes when a Sigma mine was later inspected by engineers, it bore little resemblance to the original design spec.

The controller flipped through a few more pages on his datapad. “Fascinating,” he muttered, but he didn’t look up. Klaus wondered whether he should answer, or whether his boss was talking to himself. Klaus cleared his throat. There was something else about the signal bouncing between the Sigmas that he really needed to get an executive decision on.

“Strictly speaking, it’s not outside normal operating parameters, but—”

“This is quite a storm, Mr. Klaus.”

Klaus paused. He nodded. “That it most certainly is, sir.”

The executive flipped through some more pages, nodding to himself. “Helium-3, tibanna, oxozone. Not to mention five percent vertrexan and zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-five percent lucanol.” He dropped the datapad onto his desk with a clatter and looked up at his chief engineer as he reclined in his chair. “Good work, Mr. Klaus. It’s going to be a bumper payday for all of us.”

Klaus gave a small bow. “Well, I hope so, sir.”

“You hope?”

Klaus gestured to the datapad. “The behavior of Sigma mines Five and Forty, sir. We’ve run the signal they’re bouncing to each other, but it’s not a diagnostic code. To be honest, I’m not sure what it is. I’ve worked on these platforms nearly forty years and in all that time I’ve never—”

“Don’t worry about the Sigma mines, engineer,” said the controller. He steepled his fingers and looked at Klaus with narrow gray eyes. “They can look after themselves.”

Klaus frowned, and locked his hands behind his back. “Well, sir, we can continue with the extraction, but I’d like to take Five and Forty offline for inspection. They’re about due anyway.”

The executive rolled his chair closer to his desk and leaned his elbows on the glass top. “Postpone that inspection, Chief. I want full extraction on this storm. I don’t want a single molecule of lucanol to be missed. Understood?”

“If we take the two platforms out, we’ve still got forty-eight converging on the storm. There should be no impact on extraction.”

“And there certainly won’t be if all fifty are chasing it. Proceed as normal, engineer.”

With that, the refinery controller picked up his datapad and began reading something else. The chief engineer’s audience was over.

Klaus gave another small bow. “As you wish, sir,” he said, but this time his smile was tight.

* * *

Dammit, this wasn’t right. There was something wrong with at least two of the mines. And the timing was less than perfect—if they lost the storm, if they didn’t extract every single molecule of value stirred up from the depths of Jupiter, then the boss would have his guts. Klaus had no doubt about that whatsoever. The mines could look after themselves, that was true—but even so, that didn’t make them infallible. Machines could break down. Computers—even AIs—could glitch.

The chief engineer strode away from the office and headed back toward the control center. It was a fair distance, easily traversed by elevator, but Klaus wanted to cool his heels. He took the long way, a brisk stroll around the curving orbital corridor of the refinery. The exercise would help clear his head and give him a few extra minutes to think.

What the hell was the signal from Sigmas Five and Forty? It made no sense—just a string of numbers. It sounded like quickspace coordinates, but the sequence was missing two digits. And while the transmission was garbled by the magnetic interference from the storm, the constant repetition between the two mining platforms had allowed them to check and re-check the signal. They’d got the whole thing. It was just … strange.

Parker had shown initiative, digging it out from what should have been a routine observation. Klaus wondered what he would have done, had he picked it up before the junior engineer. Probably nothing. The machine code chatter between the mining platforms was just so much background noise that Klaus had learned to tune out years ago.

Maybe he was getting old.

Klaus huffed and kept walking.

The refinery’s orbital corridor had a continuous curving window that looked out into the Jovian cloud deck. The glow from Jupiter’s atmosphere was bright, but Klaus found the purple-orange cast gloomy, the way it bleached the color from his own purple uniform and stained the otherwise gleaming white interior of the refinery into a muddy, dirty hue.

Huh. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it was just routine. Maybe he’d made an issue out of it when there was no problem, the over-enthusiastic junior engineer casting unnecessary doubt into his mind. The robot mines knew what they were doing. Okay, so the engineers in the control room ran the entire JMC operation—in theory. But, the business of gas mining aside, the JMC’s primary concern was really automation. Driven by pure profit, the corporation had pursued robotics and AI research to such an advanced level that its tech was way ahead of even what the Fleet itself—their primary customer—had. Gone were the days when the storms of the gas giants were chased manually, with pilots and their crews risking their lives aboard the giant extraction platforms. Hell, the Sigmas knew more about gas mining than even a veteran like Klaus. And he knew it.

But … it was bugging him. Something wasn’t right, and Klaus was sure of it—forty years of gas mining had given him an intuition about things like this. The problem needed to be investigated and fixed, or something would happen and they’d lose the storm. And their bonuses. Let’s see if the boss liked the sound of that.

Klaus nodded to another crewman passing from the opposite direction. Then he stopped and turned around.

The orbital corridor behind him was empty.

Klaus had stopped by an intersection, a point at which the wide corridor opened into a large, high-ceilinged atrium, complete with elevators and even seating. The space was designed to be open, something like a public square in a regular city, but the purple-orange Jupiterlight from the windows gave the whole place an eerie, dusky glow.

Klaus frowned. Whoever had passed him had vanished around the curve of the orbital corridor. He’d been distracted by his own thoughts, but it had seemed that the crewman hadn’t been wearing the company uniform. Official visits from the Fleet were commonplace—there were always sales contracts to argue over—but, as far as Klaus knew, there wasn’t a delegation due for several cycles.

Huh. It was nothing. His distracted mind playing tricks.

He turned back around and jumped in fright as he nearly ran into two people standing in the corridor—a man and a woman, dressed in black, their faces hidden behind featureless masks.

Klaus gasped, one hand reaching for the comm on the collar of his uniform even as he drew breath to ask the intruders who they were. But he was slow—the man raised a snub-nosed gun that spat a blue light with only a very high, short sound, and the chief engineer collapsed into the arms of the third intruder, who had reappeared behind him.

The murky corridor swam in Klaus’s vision as he felt a deep, deep cold spreading across his body. He tried to focus, but saw nothing except whispering dark shapes looming over him.

A woman. “Quickly. Reboot. Use the data stick.”

A man. “Got it.”

Klaus felt something needle-sharp slide into his neck. He wanted to cry out in surprise, but he couldn’t.

Someone else spoke, but their voice was a million miles away.

The woman replied, speaking, Klaus realized, into a comm. “Confirmed. Phase one initiated.” Then, louder, to her colleagues: “One down, twenty-three to go.”

And then the cold spread and the darkness grew, and Ramin Klaus’s last thought was of the signal, and what the sequence eight-seven-nine-one-two-two-Juno-Juno could possibly mean.

And then … then he saw a light. A bright, bright light.

THE BATTLE OF WARWORLD 4114

The machines were still over the horizon, but even though the battle hadn’t reached the marines hunkered down in the trench, the entire sky was lit by the fierce red-and-white aurora of suborbital bombardment.

Warworld 4114 was on fire.

In less than a cycle, the Spiders had swarmed over an entire hemisphere. Warworld 4114 was a hair smaller than Earth, an uninhabited lump of nothing, the surface alternating between thick forest and gray rocky plains. There was plant life aplenty. But animal life? Aside from the company of marines dug into the gray desert, waiting for the enemy war machines to arrive, Warworld 4114 was a dead planet.

A dead planet both sides wanted. The Spiders had moved first, as they always did, a Mother Spider seeding the world with millions of organo-mechanical babies, each the size of a dog, which landed and began consuming matter and growing and dividing and then building, until the machines now walking toward the marines’ position were eight-legged monsters a hundred meters tall, their curved, knife-like legs carving the hard surface of the planet into rubble as they advanced.

The Spiders wanted the planet, which meant the Fleet wanted it too. The battle plan was simple: hold the machines back from suborbit—the U-Stars safely out of reach, the Mother Spider having departed as soon as its spawn had touched ground—until the psi-marines could dig in. Then, weakened and distracted by the aerial onslaught, the Spiders would be disabled by the psi-marines, their relentless march halted long enough for two smaller U-Stars—in this case, the Seether and the Shutterbug—to come in for the final, low-altitude kill.

So went the theory, anyway.

Psi-Marine Tyler Smith looked up, the HUD inside his helmet tracking the path of two more photonic torpedoes as they streaked across the sky, heading for the target. The U-Stars were doing a fine job, hovering in the upper atmosphere as they dumped munitions on the war machines. Tyler just hoped it was enough. There was no doubt the Spiders were getting toasted, but there were a lot of them. What they lacked in firepower and strategy was made up by sheer numbers.

The comms buzzed in Tyler’s ear. Transmission incoming, battle command.

“Fireteam Alpha, Fireteam Bravo. Heads up, twelve o’clock.”

An amber indicator appeared in Tyler’s HUD. He glanced to his left and to his right, the other members of his seven-man psi-marine fireteam giving the thumbs up as they all squatted below the lip of the trench. Tyler pushed himself off the trench wall and, still crouching, shuffled around. The amber indicator slid around his HUD until it was dead center at the top of his vision.

Straight ahead. The Spiders were nearly here.

An alert inside Tyler’s helmet told him that Fireteam Alpha was also ready, a few hundred meters farther down the trench. Tyler lifted himself up, until his eye line was at ground level.

Down the left side of the HUD, text began to scroll as the U-Stars somewhere above began feeding data to his combat suit’s computer. As the night sky bloomed in brilliant color once more, the horizon exploding in flaring white, the HUD began drawing small red boxes—two, then three, then four, then a dozen, then Tyler lost count. The icons buzzed around the horizon like insects; then his HUD finally settled as the icons flashed, locking onto the targets.

The machines stepped over the horizon, still too far away to see any detail against the glaring whitewash of the continued aerial bombardment. But there they were—black shapes, as tall as skyscrapers, lumbering toward them. As Tyler’s combat AI fed the view to the other marines, the comms clicked to life and filled with chatter—not from the psi-marine fireteams, but the regular troops dug in half a klick in front of Tyler’s trench. There were two hundred heavily armed Fleet marines between them and the Spiders.

Once again, Tyler hoped it was enough.

He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes. Timing was key. He had to wait until the machines were close enough to make contact, but the Spiders were big, their giant legs covering alarming amounts of ground with each step. The window of opportunity was a small one.

Fireteam Alpha, confirm.

The communiqué came not over the comms, but inside Tyler’s mind. With his eyes closed he saw nothing but dull shapes moving across blackness, as his HUD continued to shine its light against his eyelids.

Fireteam Bravo, he thought, linking minds with the other team leader. Acknowledged.

There was a moment of nothing, of silence, of stillness and calm borne both of training and experience, as Tyler closed his mind to the outside world and focused in on himself. Psychic battle with the Spiders was just as dangerous as a firefight. But the two teams were good, and while they weren’t carrying anything more than small plasma rifles, they were very, very well armed indeed. The psi-marines had weaponized minds, and the battle was about to commence.

Then Tyler heard it and opened his eyes. His comms stayed quiet, but a blue triangle flickered in his HUD as the psi-fi router in his combat suit picked up the signal and amplified it, spreading the data load across all of the psi-marines. The sound in Tyler’s head made his heart race and made him feel infinitely small. It buzzed and clicked, a staccato nonsense that was half white noise, half something else. Something rhythmic. Intelligent.

The language of the Spiders.

Contact established.

Engage.

Across the plain, ahead of Tyler’s trench, the ground flickered with blue sparks as the embedded marines opened fire with their plasma rifles. Above, the two U-Stars continued to fire, the scrolling text in Tyler’s HUD showing their descent path and a countdown.

The clock had started.

Tyler dropped down into the trench and rejoined his fireteam, their backs turned to the oncoming machines, their eyes—like his—closed behind the opaque visors of their helmets.

The sound in Tyler’s head had reached a crescendo, so loud it felt like he was being physically crushed under the weight of it. Pain, hot and brilliant, shot through his eardrums, and then, behind his closed eyes, his optic nerve was lit by a wave of psychic feedback as his team opened up on the Spider communications web, throwing everything they had at jamming it.

But this … this was different. The pain, it was real. Tyler felt something warm and liquid roll down his cheeks inside his helmet. He screwed his eyes tight and screamed as he stared into the burning darkness.

The roar of the Spiders was agony without end. The screams of the psi-marines was pain beyond imagining.

The white light blazed, flaring golden, flaring blue—

* * *

Caitlin screamed and sat up, kicking at the damp sheets tangling around her feet, her drenched T-shirt slick against her skin. For a moment she could see nothing but golden light flaring and hear nothing but the roar of the ocean. But as she opened her eyes and blinked and blinked and blinked she realized the glow was morning light reflecting off the gold mirrored glass of the building opposite her own, the shard of light shining through the unfinished wall of her refuge and spotlighting her as she sat on her makeshift bed. The roaring wasn’t in her head, either. It was coming through the ceiling, the endless screech and thud of music so heavy it sounded more like an unbalanced shuttle afterburner.

She kicked the sheets clear, then leaned back and reached under her pillow. It was the only place you could keep valuables, and her most prized possession was still in place. Likewise her watch, which never left her wrist, not in a place like this. She rubbed her face and glanced at it.

Five A.M.

Time to move. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, then paused.

She’d had the dream, again. As vivid as a memory, a flashback from battle, as if it had been her on Warworld 4114, crouching in the trench, facing down the marching Spider army with her mind as her weapon.

But it hadn’t been her. She had never served the Fleet—never gotten that far. The memory belonged to someone else.

Her brother, Tyler.

Cait sniffed the air. It was warm already, although the breeze blowing in through the open wall of her twelfth-floor hideout was starting to make her shiver in her sweat-soaked underwear. Getting undressed to go to sleep was a risk—a place like this, you had to be ready to move, quickly—but it had been so fucking hot the last few nights, she’d decided to take the chance. Not that she’d been able to sleep much. The dream had disturbed her rest for most of the past two weeks.

With the music still thundering from elsewhere in the half-finished building, Cait quickly hopped across the floor, the concrete cool on her bare feet as she crouched down near the plastic crate where she had stashed her gear. That was another risk. She really should have kept the crate within arm’s reach of the bed. She chastised herself for being sloppy, but that was the last night she’d have to spend in this dump anyway.

For two weeks she’d been living—if you could call it that—high in an abandoned, unfinished skyscraper on the edge of Salt City. Despite the slum’s overcrowding, the skeletal building was only half-occupied by squatters—perhaps, Cait had thought, it was the proximity of the building to the shiny clean world of New Orem, literally just across the street, that put people off. The construction—half-finished fingers of building poking into the sky like the rotting ribs of a forgotten animal carcass—had been halted who knew how many years ago, a symbol of the Fleet’s complete indifference to the plight of the giant slum right on its doorstep. Maybe that was another reason she’d found a hideout so easily. The people of Salt City didn’t want any reminders of how the Fleet had failed them. The construction site, and the shell of the building in which Cait had made her camp, was just that.

That didn’t stop scavengers, of course. As Cait got dressed, she padded over to the open wall and looked down at the rubble-strewn ground far below. The body of the last one she’d fought off was still down there, lying in a particularly inaccessible half-finished foundation pile. She hadn’t intended to kill him, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself. Backed into a corner, fighting not just for her life but for the mission, and … it had happened again. Her wild talent had come to the fore, acting almost like it had its own intelligence, taking over to protect her when she couldn’t do it herself.

The scavenger had screamed all the way to the ground.

And he was still there. And she really hadn’t meant to kill him—her talent, her power impossible to control, no matter how hard she tried. But since then, nobody else had come to bother her. She guessed his corpse—his screams—had served as a warning. Stay away from the woman on level twelve, north side. She’s a crazy bitch.

Cait pushed the memory away, focusing on the here and now, controlling her breathing as she felt her heart rate pick up.

Because her talent was a frightening thing. And not just for scavengers or the trainers at the Academy who had seen something different about her, out of all the thousands of recruits who enrolled.

She was scared of it too.

She blew out her cheeks to calm herself, and she sat on her bed and pulled her boots on. Her outfit wasn’t black as instructed, but it was comprised of the darkest things she still owned. The pants and boots were black, but the hoodie was dark navy blue, and the T-shirt underneath was light gray—there was nothing she could do there except keep the hoodie zipped to the neck. She stood and pulled a hair tie from her pocket, scraping her still-damp bangs off her face as she looked out to the spires of the Fleet capital, New Orem, glowing in the sunrise. It was a beautiful sight, despite the ruined surrounds.

The morning sky was clear, and when the chill breeze dropped Cait could feel the real heat beginning to grow, the sunlight already reflecting off thousands of immaculate mirrored buildings opposite her own incomplete shell of one.

Today it was time to head back into the city, because today was her brother’s funeral.

It would be a military service with full honors, to be held at the Fleet Memorial, a vast cemetery on the other side of the city. Cait had worked out a route, had run it a few times to make sure it was okay. It would take three hours to get into position, as instructed. The service was due to start at one in the afternoon. She had plenty of time, but she knew she needed to get in and set up before it got too difficult.

Cait turned from the open wall and lifted her pillow. Beneath it was a slim black backpack. As she picked it up, something hard clanked inside. She unzipped the top, made sure the objects inside were secure, and slipped it on.

She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath.

I’m ready, she thought.

The breeze picked up, pulling at her hair.

I’ll see you soon, sis, said the voice of Tyler Smith inside her head, as real as her own thoughts.

Cait opened her eyes and smiled. She reached down into the plastic crate and took out a small canister of liquid. She flipped the cap, poured it over her bedding, and then walked backwards, splashing the liquid around as much as possible before tossing the container back into the crate. She took two steps down the open stairwell at the back of the room, then pulled a disposable lighter from her pocket. She flicked the flame and watched it for a moment, then threw the lighter. Immediately, her former accommodation was engulfed with thin, pale flames.

Caitlin Smith turned on her heel and jogged down the stairs.

She had a funeral to interrupt.

PART ONE

EARTH

1

The robot servitor bay was cramped, the air rich with the chemical tang of ozone and disinfectant. Von Kodiak did his best to ignore both discomforts as, balanced on one foot to reach the open access panel in the bay’s back wall, he delicately touch-soldered an exposed circuit board while holding a bundle of wires between his teeth. The service bay was almost completely dark, but the HUD in his AI glasses amplified what little light there was, allowing him to get on with his work.

Kodiak was squeezed awkwardly in one of two channels, each a meter deep and a meter wide, that ran the full length of the bay on either side of the central platform. They were designed to allow humanoid crews— humanoid crews, Kodiak thought with a sigh—a minimal amount of space to work on the cube-shaped maintenance robot that would be parked in the center. There was just enough room to stand upright in the channel, but the space was narrow and Kodiak had to lean out awkwardly to reach the access panel at the back of the dock—the alternative being to crouch in the center of the bay itself, risking life and limb if the servitor should return to port, crushing him between it and the back wall.