“Species?”
“Remember the black goo you had all over you when you awakened?” I asked.
“Vaguely.”
“That was them-or their byproducts. They were in a big tank like a bag…anyway, they all died aboard Jolly Rodger. Just before the ship blew up, I had you in a tank of these tiny creatures, and got them to rebuild your damaged cells. They could do things that nanites couldn’t do, because they were organic themselves. You owe them your life.”
“You got them to do it?” she asked. “You mean you talked to them? They are intelligent?”
“Yes, with a mass-intellect similar to the nanites.”
“How did you communicate with beings like that?”
“Through Marvin. He could talk to them.”
Sandra pulled away from me and took Ning’s ID card. She stood a few steps away rubbing her own shoulder with the card.
“Tell me, Kyle,” she said. “How did the microbes do it?”
“They needed a source of protein for raw materials. Then they broke that down and regrew it as the target form. You see my right foot? It used to be a pork chop, believe it or not.”
She dipped her head down and shivered slightly. I stepped closer, wondering if I’d blown it somehow.
“You asked me where Ning went,” she said, “well, I think you are looking at her.”
“What?” I said. Then I got it, and almost laughed. “No, no. I don’t think so. Ning is missing, but so are a lot of people. She was killed in the battle.”
“No,” Sandra said. “I found her. More than just that ID card. She was in coffin. I went back to it and dug around in the slime. There are bones in that sludge. And hair, zippers. The ID card was there too. The microbes ate her to rebuild me. And I don’t even remember her.”
I stared at her, feeling some of her horror. I was one thing to be partly made of a pork chop. After all, everyone is built from the materials they consume. But another person… Usually, I had something to say in every situation. Not this time.
Sandra caught me looking at her that way, and she let a few tears run down her cheek. “I’m a monster,” she said. “A cannibal. You should have just let me die then spaced the remains. That’s the best way. Couldn’t you have left me in peace? You shouldn’t have done it, Kyle. My life wasn’t worth someone else’s.”
“Done what?” I asked.
She stepped closer. “I should have known it was you. I’ve owed you for a long time, Kyle. You came back for me the first time I was dead in that cold ocean. You fished me out and brought me back to life. I’m a ghost twice over now, but this time the price was too high. You shouldn’t have done it.”
“Done what?”
She stepped closer and hissed her words up at me. “You shouldn’t have killed Ning and shoved her into that box.”
My mouth hung open. “I told you, I wasn’t there. I left Marvin in charge.”
Sandra stared at me, eyes narrowed in disbelief. “Really?”
“Yeah. I told him to fix you. I think I said something like: do whatever it takes. Maybe I should have been more specific.”
She closed her eyes and sagged against me. I put my arms around her and soothed her gently.
Sandra ripped loose from me suddenly, and her face had utterly changed. Instead of horror and sorrow, it was filled with rage. “We have to kill Marvin,” she said. “We have to turn him off. He’s a monster-and he’s made me into one, too!”
I looked at her seriously. The way she had moved, the power in her limbs…I could feel it. She was stronger than nanotized men. It was like soothing a wild gorilla that could rip a man’s face off.
“Marvin is cooperating right now,” I said. “He’s like all these machines-very literal-minded. But if he really killed Ning to empower you…that’s just not acceptable. I think you’re right. I’m going to have to disable him.”
Sandra came close, looking at me intently. “No,” she said, whispering. “Not disable, destroy.”
“I understand your passion,” I said. “But he’s too valuable. He can talk to these alien species. Remember when we transferred him from the Centaurs? He came across as an incomplete download. Maybe there were elements of his reasoning that are twisted up because of that.”
She stared at me in disgust. “What are you doing? Copping an insanity plea for a robot?”
“I’m telling you he knows too much to destroy. If we can get the knowledge he has-just the ability to speak the Centaur language, for example, would be invaluable to Earth.”
“I’m talking about a human life, Kyle.”
“I’m talking about billions of human lives,” I said.
We stared at each other hotly for a long time. Finally, she kissed me again, so hard it hurt my lips. It felt good, just the same.
“All right,” she said. “You do what you think you have to. But if he does anything weird, I’m pulling his plug myself.”
Anything weird? I thought. Not Marvin! His thinking was so far out of the box that he didn’t even know where the box was. I didn’t say any of these things, however. They wouldn’t have helped Sandra’s mood.
“Okay,” I said. “Check up on him. Don’t let him kill anyone else. Especially not you.”
Sandra snorted as if she didn’t think Marvin had a chance against her. I wasn’t so sure. He kept surprising me. But then again, so did she.
“All right, Colonel,” she said.
We kissed again and parted ways. My lips were burning, but I figured I might have gotten back in the loop with her somehow. I realized as I headed to the bridge that she hadn’t even mentioned Major Sarin. She’d been distracted by Marvin and Ning. Her hard kisses were punishing, and made me wonder what actual sex with her was going to be like-should I be so lucky as to find out.
43
Even with the work Marvin had already done to gather the pieces and with Welter’s expert piloting, it took us a while to collect everything we could salvage. We picked up every marine, dead or alive, and brought them back aboard for transport home.
All the while we watched space around us carefully for signs of a Macro incursion. We knew about the ring orbiting Helios, and the one further out which connected to the Eden system, but there might be others. For all we knew, the Macros were massing up and planning to come after us in force.
Once I had my factories back from Marvin, I immediately switched them over to producing sensor array units. We needed eyes now more than weapons systems. I tried to keep the cruiser as close to the Helios ring as possible for a quick exit in case the Macros did show up. I also posted men on flying dishes as sentries on the far side of the ring, in the Alpha Centauri system. They were scouts, using instruments to watch our backs. They couldn’t transmit a signal through the ring, so I had them come back through every hour to report. If they saw any ships, they were to return immediately with the news.
Keeping observers in the tri-star system did have one side benefit: we became convinced the tri-star system was indeed comprised of Alpha, Beta and Proxima Centauri. This was somehow comforting to everyone. We weren’t lost in some distant galaxy. We were only four short lightyears away, practically within shouting distance of home. We even grew to feel territorial about the system. After all, it was very close to Earth whether you were using the rings or mundane spaceflight. I’d already decided in the future we would use it as a no-man’s land buffer zone between ourselves and the Worms should both species be lucky enough to survive this war. I could see a trading post out here, maybe we’d be able to talk to them.
I knew what I should be doing next, and it involved cajoling Marvin into helping me communicate with the Worms. This was a critical mission, but I just wasn’t up to it. I had no idea how many hours it had been since I’d had a good rest, but I was sure it had been more than a day. Even with nanites removing the toxins from my blood brought on by fatigue and repairing cells that needed it, I was still coming close to a crash. The human brain needed rest and sleep with dreams to reorganize our thoughts. Without that downtime, anyone would begin to lose effectiveness and eventually go mad. I couldn’t afford to be delusional, so I began looking for a place to sleep. I found the sleeping bricks were full of like-minded marines. Disappointed, I turned around and found Sandra with her arms crossed, half-smiling at me.