IX. Home Movies
The Pebblestone Massacre
Chapters:
VII. You Have Never Known Fear
VIII. You're Not Taking Me Alive
When Amelia Ramsay was growing up, she used to spend most nights sitting by the staircase in their family’s cozy domicile, studying her datapad and waiting for her parents to get home from work. Her father would usually arrive home first, from whatever Corebound consortium he had hired himself out to at the time. She could always hear him long before he got to the door, as he made his way down the hallway, because the heavy duty mechanic’s chassis he’d had grafted onto his skeleton as a young man caused him to walk with an extremely heavy gait for the rest of his life. A sound like someone was moving two large refrigerators down the hallway a half a meter at a time would greet her expectant ears as she waited. Eventually the door would open, and there he would be—all ten feet of him, which she knew every battered metal inch of, from the scorched and pitted plates of his legs that seemed to be able to bear any possible weight she could imagine to the hulking operational manifold which formed the breadth of his shoulders. When he was home, off the clock, he was free to retract the shielding plate on his chest cavity and allow his mostly unaltered face (besides his genetic endowment, the only flesh and blood she had ever known of him) to be exposed.
“Daddy!” she would shout when she saw him, running to the doorway and grasping a leg several times larger than her, pigtails bouncing in her wake.
He had always been terrified of touching her with his hands, since the only hands available to him were construction tools. The industrial-class operational manifold he had been fitted with was equipped for nothing else. Consequently he almost always went armless around their small Corebound apartment, with his kind, jubilant face extended from his chest cavity on an accordion mechanism.
“There’s my little girl!” he would reply, his face looking down at her.
She often greeted her mother similarly when she arrived, but her mother was often very tired when she got home, and invariably went directly to the bedroom to lay down for a while. She had been similarly augmented, though with a commercial-class waitress’ chassis. Unlike the heavier portion of her husband’s apparatus, which he could detach and leave at the job site, the carousel of mechanical arms which had replaced her shoulders could not be removed.
Though her face was elaborately made up when she left for work, by the time she came in the door it was lifeless and glassy-eyed beneath the paint. Her mother would brush Ramsay’s head with the mechanical arm she used as her main appendage, the one that had the most human-looking hand, though it was three-fingered and meant for gripping the handles of mugs and pitchers, mumble something incoherent, then trudge upstairs towards the dark of the bedroom.
As soon as she had learned the simple procedure involved in preparing the food supplement her father ate, she had begged her mother to take over this task from her, a request her beleaguered mother had been only too happy to grant. So she would slide the metal tray bearing his prepared food dispenser in front of the place he usually settled down into in a corner of the living room, and they would grin at each other as he lowered his face down to the nozzle to eat and she sat nearby peeling the wrapper off of her Children’s Food Ration.
#
The Core was more or less a space station, though it was the size of most star systems, its people and their works concentrating rather than expanding. It was the center of Authority control in this region of space, though apart from this facility the rest of the Authority’s holdings amounted to swathes of deadspace, ship graveyards, and a few podunk rural stations and clusters.
It had grown over the millennia into something its founders would no doubt find unrecognizable, consuming the suns in the system of its origin to have them become nothing more than reactors for its enterprises. Even though its extensive growth and thorough assimilation of its environment had resulted in the formation of a wide variety of different styles of architecture, machines, humanoids and other creatures, over millennia its titanic, honeycombed interior had come to accommodate two main class distinctions in its society.
Those who lived close to the center were the Corebound, and it was a general rule of thumb that the closer you traveled towards the core of the Core, the more destitute would you find the people who lived there. In the Utter Core lived only specialized humanoids colloquially referred to as Reactormonkeys, brainwipes who were trained only to work in the inhospitable environment of the reactors, and who usually only lived a couple of years at most.
Conversely, the closer you traveled to the edge of the Core, the more materially well off and seemingly closer to Authority the people you would find there would be. And as the facility accreted at its outward edge, the newest additions to its construction would also be found there, and would generally represent cutting edge Core technology.
Concerning the genesis of the Core...
#
“...there can be no doubt as to Authority’s hand in those matters. This region of space as it existed before Reason Invested Authority With Command was a depraved wasteland. Barbarians mostly; no interstellar travel, no matter conversion technology; victims of circumstance and a culture of lawless piracy.”
The Education Official was displaying a slideshow to accompany this speech, beaming from her face mounted projection apparatus. It showed a convoy of comically ill-equipped space vessels, all leaking atmosphere and putting along on uncertain engines, being attacked by pirates. All of the humanoids depicted, defenders and attackers alike, were hairy-looking, had jutting brow ridges, and were dressed in soiled rags.
The children gathered together in the darkened Education Chamber gasped as the convoy in the slideshow was shot to pieces. Their rows of rapt faces were lit by the hologram.
“Confusion prevailed,” the Education Official continued. “No voice tamed the chaos. No spoken vision could collect the will of the masses. Until...” A question mark symbol appeared projected towards the students. “Well, until what, class?”
Almost instantly the reply was sounded, in a delirious, staggered unison. “Until The Voice Spoke The Command,” the class intoned.
“That’s right!” the Education Official said. “And we are still carrying out that Command to this day!” The projection flickered back to the Official’s normally displayed hologram, a sort of garish cartoon woman-face with rosy cheeks. “Isn’t that nice?” she asked the class.
The lights brightened until they had reached their usual glaring directionless intensity.
“Does that answer all your questions about the how the Core got started?” she asked the children as they sat blinking at the light and rubbing their eyes.
Amelia raised her hand.
“Yes, Miss Ramsay,” the Official said.
“Is it true the Corebound areas are actually much older and were built before the Authority came to power?” she asked.
“That is completely untrue,” the Official said cheerily. “The technology necessary for the Core’s construction was unknown prior to Authority coming to power.”
“Because I read on the newsnets that some archaeologists are saying that dating of the Corebound components ante ... ante... um, well, that they are older than the year when The Voice Spoke The Command.”
Amelia could hear some of her classmates nearby muttering darkly at her impertinence.
“And were these ... sanctioned newsnets?” the Official asked, rolling slightly closer, the projected cartoon face inclining.
“Um,” Amelia said, thinking. “It was on one of the channels I can get by scanning the upper bands.”
“Ah.” The projected face appeared momentarily beatific and all-knowing. “That explains it, then. Miss Ramsay is confused. Maybe we can help her, class. If it wasn’t the voice of Authority speaking, how could she trust it?” The face smiled out at the children, waiting for an answer.
Eventually another girl sitting nearby, who had been doing most of the dark muttering, realized the opportunity and her hand shot up.
“Miss Fleeglox?”
“She shouldn’t have trusted it,” the other girl said.
“That’s right!” the Official praised her.
Glaria Fleeglox flushed with pleasure.
As the lessons continued Amelia frowned, felt confused.
#
One day, when Amelia was still quite young, her mother didn’t come home. Her father was quiet that evening, his eyes bloodshot. When she asked him where she was he told her he didn’t know. A few days later she asked him if she was ever going to come back and he answered her, no. She wouldn’t be coming back. And his face wept, bobbing on the end of its accordion arm. She tried her best to comfort him, wrapping her tiny arms around the unyielding expanse of his leg and lower torso, until he lowered his face down to her and she held it as they cried.
She later learned that her mother had killed herself by climbing into a reactor ventilation shaft.
Her father was never really the same afterwards. Some of his joviality returned, she suspected mostly for her benefit, but his face developed a grim countenance. More and more he kept it concealed behind the shielding plate unless she reminded him.
#
The Screwface Shafts were an abandoned section fairly deep in the Corebound areas that Amelia and her friends used to frequent when they were youths, often to joyride through the darkened shafts and tunnels. Modifying hovercraft was a common hobby among her peer group, and she herself was as much a mechanic as a pilot. She found the sensation of flying nearly blind through the maze of shadowy passageways exhilarating.
“Here’s spit in your eye, you fucking Authority bastards!” her friend, Jools Velator shouted, whooping as he banked his craft up a shaft some distance ahead, whipping out of sight.
“He’s going to get himself killed,” Amelia said, mostly to herself, though within speaking distance of Nathan Freewheels as they cruised along on their hovercraft.
Freewheels checked his throttle, prepared his afterburners. “Yeah, but what’s going to get him first, the Authority or a wrong turn in these shafts?” he asked her.
“Every turn’s a wrong turn in the Core,” she said.
He cackled at the reply and gunned his engines. Afterburners shot him ahead of her, his craft twisted in the air, and then he was gone up the shaft after Jools.
Amelia roared her hovercraft onward, past the passageway where they had turned upwards, quite familiar with this section of the maze and planning to get ahead of them both through a shortcut.
Left. Right. Left. Under the ancient desiccated fan blade, and over the collapsed ventilation shaft.
She was cruising through an old pipeline that ran through this area for kilometers, eyes on her rear view scanner, when first she saw Jools dip into the tunnel, then Freewheels, both well behind her. She turned back briefly from where she was crouched atop her hovercraft, and made a derogatory gesture at them.
“You sneaky bitch!” Jools shouted at her, grinning.
Then they all angled upwards, out of the pipe and into an old elevator shaft, moving vertically, overtaking one another in turns, laughing gleefully. As they ascended, the shaft widened in intervals, and seemed to boast more sophisticated components. They moved briefly through a horizontal section of train tunnel, Freewheels leading, with tracks on both floor and ceiling (or both walls), then were moving up through another elevator shaft.
“I bet this shit goes straight to space!” Jools screamed into the raw wind whipping into his face as they rode. He maxed out his afterburners, rapidly gaining velocity.
His two friends watched as he zoomed on up the shaft, crossing the path of an active hovertrain that passed, in the blink of an eye, through the place he had just been.
#
Two years later she was lying in a narrow space on a metal overhang, close to the ceiling of this chamber, looking out over a commercial area several hundred feet below. Beside her lay Nathan Freewheels. They were both naked.
Sweat soaked Freewheels’ brow as he lit a drug stick, inhaled on it, and then passed it to Ramsay. She took it slightly awkwardly and puffed on it as she looked down at the bustling figures so far below down in the marketplace.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked her.
“My mother,” she replied.
“You didn’t inhale,” he said, as she tried to pass the drug stick back to him. “You need to draw the smoke into your lungs after you puff on it.”
She frowned dubiously at him as she puffed on it again, and then drew in a breath with the smoke in her mouth. Then she coughed. He laughed at her, slapping her exposed hip, and she punched him in the shoulder. After she had passed it back to him, he winced when she wasn’t looking and rubbed the wound.
“The Authority says that shit rots your brain,” she said.
He rolled his eyes. “You know what else they say.”
She chewed her lips, looking down at the crowd, thinking. They passed the drug stick back and forth a few times.
“Why were you thinking of your mother?” he asked.
“She used to work down there.” She rubbed her eyes, which looked slightly bloodshot. “She was a waitress.”
“Oh,” he said, crushing out the stub of the drug stick on the edge of the platform. “What do you remember about her?” he asked, studying her through eyes filled with tenderness.
“She was tired. A lot of the time. Sometimes she sat with me and dad while we watched the holoscreen in the evenings. Or we played games. I remember her being really funny sometimes.” She brushed a tear out of one eye.
“Hey,” he said, and touched her shoulder.
She moved closer to him and they embraced, kissed.
After a while she pushed hair away from her face, her mind coming back to a refrain it had been chasing all day. “This Recruiting Officer was at the school again,” she said, with irritation.
“I know,” Freewheels said. “He spoke to us too.”
She shook her head slowly as she thought about it, her body tensing. “The worst part about it is the things he says, not the things I know about him, or about this place. I mean, if you could pretend for a second that everything he says is legitimate, separate from the context of our lives, then it might seem quite accurate.”
Freewheels frowned. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“I mean, the whole bullshit story they tell... It’s like a child making toys of the tools of adults. The notion of standing for kindness and decency and protecting the weak is legitimate, and I sometimes can’t help but be... confused sometimes, even momentarily... wondering whether there isn’t some of that sort of inherent legitimacy still present within the corrupted forms on display.”
“Here?” he asked.
Frustration flashed in her eyes. “Well, where else? It’s not as though we can just hop a transport to... where? The Luminescence? Deadspace?”
“Hey, cool it, dynamo,” he said, spreading his hands out toward her. “Are you going to pop me one, or what?”
She stared angrily for a moment, and then it melted as she breathed out raggedly in a sigh. “Maybe,” she said.
“There’s always Pebblestone Cluster,” he mused, after a time. “My uncle has a mining claim on a rock out there.”
“What cluster?” she laughed. “Are you shitting me?”
He looked slightly hurt. “Pebblestone’s a fair size. I’ve never seen it, but my uncle’s been out there for years.”
“Rock farmers?” She considered the idea, smiling. “I think I like it.”
#
She was heading back towards the apartment she shared with her father, the apartment she had grown up in, along the raised metal catwalk stretched along a row of doors between two elevator shafts, when she saw them. Two men augmented with mechanic’s chassis, like her father, though she didn’t recognize them. She slowed as she approached them. They both looked grim.
“Amelia Ramsay?” the older one asked her.
“Yes?” she asked, feeling suddenly woozy.
“Can we come inside?” His chassis was equipped with some kind of manipulator rig and he was spinning one of the ends of it back and forth nervously, a pained expression on his face. “It’s about your father.”
He had been attacked, they said, while he was on his way home from work. It was some Corebound gang of hoods, they figured, operating out of a nearby abandoned zone. Armless, he had been unable to defend himself, and they disabled him and salvaged him for parts.
The next morning she had been at the Authority Recruitment Center to enlist, face ravaged by grief, with only her racing leathers on her back.
“Are you sure about this, Miss?” a kindly old sergeant asked her, proffering a signature plate somewhat hesitantly.
She glared at him as she pressed her thumb to it.
#
Some years later she was crouched atop the mounting bracket for a cluster of antennas that hung out over a long, empty shaft. She was primed, trying out a new combat trance she had learned recently, besides the armor she was wearing focusing her perception into a tunnel of violence. She felt like the sort of weapon those hunted must wake up in a cold sweat from nightmares of sometimes, terrified of seeing it there looming over them.
Blacking out the armor, she leapt.
Hurtling down through the shaft, she briefly remembered another journey, up, through a shaft much like this one, once.
Then she was through, into the transportation redirection chamber. The chamber was gigantic in size. Lines of ship traffic entered through orifices in its walls, curved about, lanes merging and diverging through the demarcated routes, exiting the chamber in other places. Like a swooping hawk she wove her way through the lines of traffic, falling, invisible.
There was a maintenance shaft half a meter across that was her planned point of egress here. She spotted it, angled her descent towards it, and cleared the frame of the shaft headfirst, her armored body streamlined, and began dropping rapidly through the narrow space beyond. She executed a few quick turns into adjoining shafts, following a route she had previously memorized, and then she scanned a series of sensor nets running across the shaft below her. The stealth field being generated by the armor she was wearing was fully aware of them, she saw, checking its indicator in her lensview, and she passed through them undetected.
Below was a tougher sensor net, one that could actually become a defensive field if it sniffed her out as an intruder, but codes she had been provided as part of this mission appeared to satisfy it and she passed rippleless through its opaque curvature into the smaller, though still cavernous area it contained. In this area was a physically armored crystalline pyramid positioned in the center. Around it were rows of weapons platforms, racks of attack drone launchers, and scanning equipment. She could vaguely see shadows of movement inside the structure with her naked eye, but it scanned redly opaque in her lensview.
Canceling her velocity, she hovered briefly on a jet rig strapped to her back, bringing a modified launcher cannon around into firing position from where she had it stowed. From it she fired the special charge it had been loaded with towards the central structure. It glued itself to the shiny surface, and began its calibration cycle.
Immediately all of the weapons platforms below her acquired her, and a starburst of targeting warnings unfolded in her lensview. They didn’t fire, probably waiting to see what she would do, or even what she was, as the attack drones began launching. Within a couple of seconds the drones had her surrounded in concentric rings, weapons trained.
The charge completed its calibration cycle and exploded. Simultaneously she released a defensive energy nova that managed to cripple most of the drones around her as it expanded. The weapons platforms began firing, but she was moving, downwards on her jets, firing standard explosive charges before her, clearing a path. She landed running as her jets cut out. Ahead she scanned the fractured aperture in the crystalline structure and, when the distances were right, she leapt.
Up the arc of her jump she fired two charges, more to create cover with the resulting explosions than to do any physical damage to the plethora of weapons platforms remaining, at the apex of the arc she dropped the launcher cannon, deploying instead wristcannons from gauntlet units she was wearing, turning in the air and peering down through the hole as she began to drop into it.
There was a large figure standing below, armored, holding some kind of energy staff. She fired a stun bolt from her wristcannon into his face as he began to look up at her, then she dropped through the aperture, scattering a handful of gas and stealth units below her as she fell.
The gas was already blossoming into a heavy cloud on the floor of the chamber as she dropped into it, but she caught a look at something across the room before everything became obscured that nearly snapped her out of her combat trance. It was purple, massive, and appeared rather animated before she lost sight of it.
She stood blinking a moment too long after she landed, and was pounced upon from one side by some kind of attack beast. It clobbered her on the ground with its piston-like limbs, and she felt her chest armor starting to give as she managed to get one wristcannon around into its side. She fired into it until it was a smoking mess that fell away from her as she stood.
There was another one, she thought, circling to one side of her, but her scanner was just as confounded by the gas as theirs would be – hopefully. She fired to the left of where she thought it was, then leapt to the right and was sliding along the ground as it came into view above her to be blown apart in the air.
She was up on one knee as the gas began to clear. Another armored figure came towards her as she stood up, swinging an energy blade around in an arc aimed at her head. She ducked it and fired her wristcannon into the figure’s chest.
The room was nearly clear now. One half of the room was a wide open space, where she had been fighting, and the other was raised slightly and filled with consoles and equipment. Two individuals were standing on the other side of the room. One of them was a purple caterpillar, the front half of which was standing nearly the height of the large room. The other was an average-looking, apparently unaugmented humanoid wearing loose-fitting black clothing.
She fired a stun bolt at the humanoid, but he deflected it with some sort of field rig that he must have had concealed somewhere, and began walking towards her. She switched to a laser stream and fired constantly at him, circling to one side as he approached. At first he was deflecting the stream off towards the ceiling, but then it was deflecting directly back at her and her wristcannon exploded, throwing her back off her feet.
Her arm was badly damaged, but appeared to be mostly intact. She fired two microcharges at him as he closed on her, trying to get to her feet, but they never went off as he swatted them aside.
She thought he seemed to be slower than she might have expected as his hand came around in a wide arc to punch her, but when she blocked it with one forearm he delivered a series of blows that were much too fast for her to follow. When it was over, what had been her good arm was broken and pinned across her back as she wheezed on one knee, her attacker’s other arm clamped across her throat.
Ramsay peered up through black spots in her vision, her combat trance shattered, her armor’s electronics blown out, body wracked with pain, and saw that the caterpillar was looking at her.
“Holy shit, that was a cool fight,” it said. It appeared to be talking through a bright yellow snout in the middle of its face. The area above the snout was covered in shiny black eyes. “I mean, I’ve seen some really awesome fights throughout the years, and I’ve got to say, you’re a natural, kid!”
One of Ramsay’s lungs had been shredded by her three broken ribs and she coughed up bloody foam and spat it onto the metal deck plating.
It had been stationary so far, but now the caterpillar moved towards her, rippling along its length rhythmically as its numerous pairs of prolegs took their turns stepping in her direction. “I thought you might be something special, and it looks like I was right.”
Ramsay tried to gather her wits and her breath. The mission was a complete failure. Was this thing The Authority? It had been prepared for her. “You might as well peel my brain for secrets right now,” she said. “I’m not telling you anything.”
It halted now, leaning in above her. Its many eyes all appeared to be flicking towards her, each trying to get their own view. “Tell me anything about what?” it asked. “About how you’ve covertly been working for a splinter cell of an underground organization bent on the destruction of the Authority, concurrent with your training at the Authority Officer’s Academy?” The eyes peered at her.
She stared at it, speechless.
It laughed with a high pitched, nasal tone, shaking its head as its upper segments rolled with the laughter. “Amelia Ramsay, who I groomed for a quarter of a century to be an elite Authority Officer, what aren’t you going to tell me about? About the split loyalties you’ve possessed all your life, between wanting to help your fellow entities while being forced to work around your whole bullshit society, lying to your face about caring for those same values, only to be trampling on them a moment later, its outward faces meanwhile acting confused through screens of deniability? Are you not going to tell me about that, Amelia Ramsay?”
It slapped its upper body segment with one of its truelegs in its mirth as the laughter died out. “Hoo boy,” it said.
A moment passed.
“No, seriously,” it said. “Is that what you were talking about?”
“I was...,” she said. “I wasn’t...” She paused, confused. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Good question!” it proclaimed. “You’ll make a fine cop, yet. Maybe. I’m from a place whose name you can’t pronounce located on the other side of the galaxy. My name, you would also find unpronounceable, but most around here call me The Authority. I won this whole shebang in a card game back home a couple hundred years ago.”
“Whole ... shebang?” she asked.
“Um, yeah,” it said. “The Authority gig. It’s been passed around a fair bit recently, but I may wind up being the individual to hold it for the longest consecutive period in ten thousand years. If I can hang onto it for another hundred or so, that is.” It leaned towards her with a conspiratorial air, as if preparing to confide to her a tremendous secret. “You know, I thought this gig was going to be a real pain in the ass at first, but the truth is, I’m loving every minute of it. This is much better than hanging around back home, begging for scraps from the Pit Lords.”
She was lightheaded. “Are you ... helping me?”
“Sure. Absolutely. Actually, we’re helping each other. Gotta trim that old rebellion tree every once in a while, you know what I mean? Getting to be about time. We rooted out a couple dozen splinter cells out of this sting. A few hundred personnel, all their equipment, a couple of ships.” The snout looked like it was smiling at the corners. “It’s a pretty heavy blow for those boys. And in return,” it said, pausing dramatically, “...I believe I hear a swell of celebratory music playing somewhere, because it’s graduation time for you, kiddo! You’ve more than proved yourself.”
“Graduation?” she asked. She felt sick.
“Yep, you canny officer, you! But first you’ll have to spend a few days in a rehabilitation chamber, sorting out that screwball noggin of yours.”
She slammed her head back, intending to catch the figure restraining her in his face, but caught only air. The hold intensified, as did the pain, and then she was tossed to the ground. Instantly immobile, she was lifted into the air like a puppet, caught in a stasis field.
“See?” the creature said. “I guess it’s an understandable impulse, given what you’ve gone through growing up, but it’s not going to work out for what I have planned. I like to keep the field littered with operatives, pieces I can control, you know. Maybe it’s the game player in me.” It shrugged. “How I wound up here in the first place.”
A door to the side of the room opened and a group of humanoids entered. A couple of them looked like muscle. One was heavily augmented with surgeon’s equipment. One was Nathan Freewheels.
She stared at him.
When he saw her he looked relieved. “Amelia,” he said. “They cleared out the hole. I think they know everything.”
“I know,” she told him.
“And that one, I just thought looked tasty,” the creature said.
One of the armored humanoids in the group lifted a stungun to Freewheels head and fired it. The lights went out of his eyes and he slumped to the ground.
“What the fuck?” Ramsay shouted. “You just said you have everything you want! Pop him in a chamber too! Wipe everything, just leave him alive!” She felt she should be struggling, but apart from her face she could move nothing inside the stasis field.
“Yeah,” the caterpillar said, moving over towards Freewheels’ slumped form as his minions backed away from it. “Everything plus lunch. I’m feeling pretty good about it.” It reached out with one of its truelegs and snagged the unconscious man from the ground with it. “Don’t worry,” it said. “That stungun was cranked. He’s brainwiped.” It bit off Freewheels’ head and started chewing on it, talking around the food as it ate. “I don’t like when they’re moving around,” it said. “It’s creepy.”
Ramsay’s stomach was churning as her world reeled around her. The one with the surgeon’s augmentations walked over to her.
“I will not forget this!” she screamed at the creature.
It continued biting off pieces of Freewheels and eating them, staring at her.
“I will never work for you, you god damn monster!” With every ounce of her strength she surged against the bonds, but found no give whatsoever within their embrace.
The surgeon lifted one of his augmented arms, loaded with tools, towards her head, and then looked to the caterpillar for approval.
“You are going to pay!” she screamed at it, her voice hoarse and ragged. “People are going to find out about this!”
The creature tore a leg off of the corpse, tossed the rest to the ground, and began chewing one end of the leg as he studied her. Finally it seemed satisfied and nodded at the surgeon, who promptly fired a calibrated wave of energy through her brain, causing significant damage and wiping out whole tracts of memory.
She stared dazed for a moment as the surgeon scanned her. Then the stasis field dropped her and she was swaying on her feet until she caught one of the surgeon’s mechanical arms and he steadied her. “Where am I?” she asked.
“You’re coming with me,” the surgeon told her. “I’m going to help you.”
He began leading her from the room, the giant caterpillar watching her all the while.
As they passed the remains of the corpse, she looked at it deliriously. “What happened to that man?” she asked.
“That’s not a man,” the surgeon said.
#
Later she woke up in a brightly lit hospital room with white walls. She was lying in a bed and felt very comfortable. Soon after she awoke a young-looking humanoid doctor walked in looking at a datapad he was holding in his hand. He glanced at her, and then looked back at the datapad. “Okay, uh, Cadet Ramsay, is it?”
“Yep.” She nodded.
“I’m Captain Nalsen,” he said. “Do you remember where you are?”
“Yep,” she repeated, smiling slightly. “I’m in the hospital at the Academy.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s good.” He manipulated the datapad. “You just underwent major surgery. Full sedation was in effect for twelve hours and thirty-seven minutes. People have been known to experience memory loss with that degree of sedation.”
She nodded. “I know. That’s what the other doctor told me—again—before they put me under. But I agreed to the risk.”
“Can you move your extremities?” the doctor asked.
She wiggled her fingers and toes, and he made another note on his datapad.
“Good,” he said. “Well, it looks like the risk paid off. They swapped in a top of the line war chassis for what you used to walk around with. The only biological material you have left of your birth is your brain, and that’s sealed inside a housing mounted in your chest that’s nearly as impenetrable and indestructible as we can make it. Fully reinforced bio job on the exterior.”
A holographic window resolved beside her hospital bed displaying a true image of Amelia Ramsay staring back at herself. She touched her cheek, her hair. She could detect no difference. “Brain in my chest?” she asked uneasily. “That’s a bit weird.”
He shook his head. “Safest place for it. You’re a war machine now, built to survive. That’s what you signed up for, isn’t it?” he asked her.
“Sure is,” she replied. But the heart she didn’t even have anymore felt hollow.
#
On the embarkation platform she crossed towards the loading area for the three massive interstellar ships which were docked nearby. The whole ceiling was a transparent canopy looking out on the stars. It was the first time Amelia Ramsay had ever stood before open space.
She crossed towards the loading area with nothing more than the new body she had been given, and a crisp blue uniform on her back. There was a desk set up nearby where a couple of crusty old colonels sat talking to each officer about their assignment as they came through. One of them had an old fashioned looking mechanical arm and he waved her over with it as she approached. “Lieutenant,” he said. He looked like he was getting information from a lens he was wearing in one eye. “Ramsay, is it?”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Well, Ramsay,” he said, “it looks like you have the pick of the litter. The three ships through those doors are splitting up, heading out to our far holdings in the Colonies. One’s going to our Watchtower out on the edge of Deadspace; one’s heading in galaxy to that far flung den of depravity, Luminescence, in the far nebulas; and the other’s going in the other direction, out along the rim, to Pebblestone Cluster.”
She was feeling rather melancholy for some reason, even though she knew she was about to embark on a great adventure. She might have chosen the Watchtower, it would have probably meant a minimum of bullshit since the place was known for its almost monastic character; or she might have chosen Luminescence, stories of its grandeur having reached even down into the Corebound areas where she had grown up; but when the colonel had said Pebblestone Cluster she had felt a tug of emotion from somewhere she couldn’t identify.
The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that she couldn’t make any other choice.
Particularly enjoyed this part.