Dust, Chapter 21 (Patreon)

As voted for, tying for first with All the little lost... is a continuation of the Dust series, my own Second Variety/Screamers re-imagining. Plenty of you seem to like it, so here is a continuation. The rest of the story can be found in the tags.

I'll probably post the series elsewhere later in the month, but for now you get to be the first to see its latest update. Thanks for your support and I hope you enjoy!

~

Chapter 21: Diplomacy

The doors to the conference room opened and D’Antonio stepped inside, Kawalsky right behind him. Rashid half-rose to his feet. “Captain?” Things had been tense while he’d been gone, but nobody had gotten out of hand. The closest thing to a problem was the Connie chatting up Lorelai, completely unaware that he was trying to get into the pants of a machine that would just as soon split him from crown to balls as let him get a leg over.

He’d eavesdropped on their conversation. Lorelai had talked about living in the remains of New Berlin, surviving day to day, making vague allusions to her life before A-Day and that she’d worked with the captain previously. She didn’t repeat herself, didn’t stare in silence at unexpected questions and didn’t sound like she was running through a list of possible responses or any of the other ways other skinjobs tripped up when interacting with humans. Rashid stayed silent, a familiar sense of anxiety gnawing at him. He’d felt it since the captain had first introduced his ‘friend’ and he’d seen just how fucking human she could pretend to be.

“At ease,” Nicholas told his people, making an Alliance military hand sign to confirm. He glanced across his squad – anxious, cooped up and unhappy about the situation – but his eyes rested on Lorelai. She was sitting across the table from one of the guards; the Connie had stood up as soon as his captain entered the room. Foolishly, he’d turned his back on the woman. If she’d just been the duster she appeared to be, it would be a lapse in judgment, but the table was wide enough that it would be tricky for even the most determined attacker to get up and launch themselves across it before the soldier or his companion noticed.

With an SV like Lorelai, he’d be dead in a fraction of a second. But, as Nicholas had noted to himself more than once in his association with the gynoid, she didn’t really need that opening. Some of the earlier humanform models were no faster than a regular human. The more advanced production lines had much better reaction times. He’d never seen any of them that were as fast as Lorelai.

The machine woman stared back at him, giving Nicholas a minute nod of understanding. It struck him how much she trusted him that she would follow his lead... and that he trusted her to do so. No matter how often he had that particular epiphany, it always felt like the first time. “Captain D’Antonio and I have come to an understanding,” he said.

“An understanding, sir?” That question came from Colmec. During their hike to Alliance HQ, her normal buzz cut had started to grow out. She’d been trying to keep it trimmed back down, but the battery on her razor had died three days into their march.

“More or less,” D’Antonio agreed. “You’re all free to go,” he told the assembled Alliance personnel. “Your weapons and equipment will be returned to you and you’ll be allowed to move through the parts of the facility we’ve secured – as long as you behave.”

Khatri raised an eyebrow. “And what’s the catch?”

“The catch, lieutenant,” Kawalsky said, interjecting, “is that when we go home, we’re bringing a few extra people with us.”

~

As his unit sorted themselves out after being given their gear back and D’Antonio rounded up his people for the briefing he and the Alliance captain were going to give, Nicholas took Lorelai aside for a private conversation. The pair retreated to a small side corridor whose single overhead lamp shone dimly. “How are you doing?” Nicholas asked.

“I’m fine,” she answered. “How are you doing? Conglomerate soldiers weren’t high on the list of things you expected to find here.”

“It’s touch and go,” he told her. “D’Antonio and his people have been through it, but I think we can work with them, at least for now. Have there been any issues?” He’d already spoken with Rashid, but he wanted Lorelai’s opinion.

“None,” she affirmed. “Lieutenant Khatri kept your people calm.”

“And no hint that they know about you?”

“No human ever has – not unless I show them.”

Her words, a simple statement of fact, proved both reassuring and unnerving. It was a combination of emotions Nicholas was quite familiar with. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

She cocked her head. “Do you think it will?”

He scratched his chin. There was a bristle of stubble there. His grooming standards had lapsed on this hike, too. “I want to say no.”

“But you’re not saying it,” Lorelai pointed out. A lot of the SVs stumbled over social cues. She had the same faults, occasionally oblivious to interpersonal drama, but she knew how to recover from those lapses in a way her counterparts struggled with. She also learned quickly; she already knew how to read Nicholas far better than any human ever could, even his ex-fiancee. He didn’t know how he felt about that.

“No,” he had to agree. “I’m not.” He rubbed his forehead. “These are Conglomerate. I’ve been in the Alliance long enough to see our cold war turn hot, and I’ve fighting the Connies for more than five years. I’ve watched them try to sink their grubby hooks into this planet. I’ve lost people to them, more than I can count. I’ve lost friends. I watched them carpet-bomb cities and drop nukes on civilians. If it wasn’t for A-Day, I might even say they got exactly what they deserved, but that’s not the world we live in. We could use their help.”

“Do you?” Lorelai pressed. “You have the codes to get into the comm center. They need you more than you need them.”

“Maybe so, but I don’t want to have to kill anyone I don’t have to.” He’d stopped Lorelai from vivisecting that little monster Katie back in New Berlin for the same reason as he was trying to avoid starting a firefight with the Connies. “Enough people have already died on this planet.”

“How do you know when it’s enough?” she asked, genuinely curious.

Nicholas could only smile at the question. “The same way you do, I imagine.”

She frowned, mulling that thought. Nicholas put a hand on her head, ruffling her blonde hair. He wouldn’t have dared to do that with any other SV, even a dead one. “Go meet up with the others,” he said. “I’ll be talking to everyone shortly.”

The machine woman nodded, turning to go. “Lorelai,” Nicholas called after her. She paused, looking back at him. “Keep an eye on things,” he advised her. “I want to say no, but....” he trailed off.

She gave him a choppy nod and a reassuring thumbs-up. She understood.

If the situation did turn, then at least he had an ace in the hole. If the Connies thought things had been bad before, then being trapped underground with an 053 would redefine the term for them.

Briefly.

~

In this part of OpCent, there was nowhere with enough seating for both groups of soldiers, so the briefing took over one of the empty store rooms. The Conglomerate team seated themselves first, taking the few crates and canisters as chairs. There were about twice as many of them than Alliance; Nicholas counted twenty-two. With the losses that D’Antonio mentioned, he’d probably started with five twelve-man squads.

The Alliance squad stood or leaned against the walls, both sides eyeing each other suspiciously. Neither one looked like they were going to start trouble, but they were both clearly waiting for the other group to make a false move. The tension in the air was so thick that you could cut it with a knife... or a saw blade.

Lorelai sat cross-legged on the floor, twirling a lock of blonde hair in a pantomime of nervous energy. She smiled at a Connie who greeted her before seating himself alongside his people. It was the same guard who’d been talking with her earlier. It looked like she was making friends. Good for her.

D’Antonio and Kawalsky didn’t keep their people waiting. The Conglomerate captain spoke first, directly addressing his people. He didn’t try to soften or dance around, getting right to the meat of things. “We’re going to work together,” he began. He didn’t give the stir of discontent time to rise. “Yes, I know. I know who these people are. You know what they’ve done. I’m not asking you to like them. I’m not asking you to forgive them. What I am asking is that you put all that aside until we get off this planet. Hate them all you want, but keep it to yourself. Curse their mothers for bringing them into the world, but do it under your breath. We work together,” he repeated with greater emphasis, “or none of us get off this planet. We can’t get into the comm array without them, and they need us to help secure it. That’s the long and short of it. No arguments. No fights. That’s our agreement. Once we get off Alcatar, we go our separate ways. Until then, these are your new squadmates. If you have a problem with that, speak up now. You’ll go on the sidelines and we’ll work around you. If you don’t speak up and start causing problems, that makes you a threat to the mission and every other man and woman here. So make your choice now.”

There was a rustle of murmurs as the Conglomerate soldiers whispered among themselves. Then the sergeant – Omerta – nodded. “We’ll do it, captain. For the mission.”

“I didn’t doubt it.” D’Antonio gestured to Nicholas and stepped back.

“The same goes for all of you,” Kawalsky said to his people. “They say they know us, well we know them. They can blame us for the SVs. We can blame them for the bombing. Around and around it goes, with both us getting madder and madder until someone does something stupid and all we’ve fought for goes down the shitter.

“We’ve all lost people in this war. We all have grudges and scores to settle, but right now I need you to hold that back. I’m not asking you to forgive or forget, either. What I know you can do is keep everything they’ve done to us down until support gets here. We get every last person we can off Alcatar and then we let the brass decide what to do with it. If they want to keep fighting over it, they’re welcome to, but we’ve done our part.

“I know you’re all tired. I’m tired too, but stomaching the presence of some Connies is the least of what any of us has had to deal with in the last few months. We made it through the war. We made it through the firebombing. We made it through A-Day. We’ve kept ourselves and our people alive. This is no different, so if they can work with us, we can work with them. That’s all there is to it. If you can’t, you let me know here and now. Otherwise, we keep going until we cross the finish line. We just need to go a little farther, just push a little more. We’re getting everyone we can over that line,” he reiterated. “Everyone. Conglomerate, Alliance – right now, we’re all human. It’s us against a world that wants us dead, and we don’t have time for grudges right now.”

“We’re with you, captain,” Rashid confirmed. “All the way.”

“I’m with you too,” Lorelai said from where she sat.

“I appreciate that,” Nicholas answered. “Get yourselves settled. Captain D’Antonio and I will be planning the best way to get to the pulse comm, so get some rest and down time while you’re waiting.”

“Sergeant Omerta,” D’Antonio nodded to his senior remaining noncom. “Liaise with Mitchum and Mallory,” he gestured vaguely in the direction of the Alliance second lieutenant and sergeant. “Brief them, show them around and get their people bunked.”

The sergeant, a dark-haired and stout woman with a recent scar crossing one side of her face, nodded. “This way,” she grunted to the Alliance personnel.

“And this way, captain,” D’Antonio gestured. Kawalsky beckoned Khatri to follow him, the two men shadowed by their lieutenants. “I’ll show you what we’ve been dealing with up until now.”

~

“We came in through the northernmost bunker,” D’Antonio began. The room he’d led Kawalsky and Khtari to was a cramped office, hastily converted into a workable command center for the Conglomerate unit. There was a single tall circular table in the middle of the room with an in-built holo unit. From it, a highlighted wireframe holo-image of the Alliance HQ was projected.

Mercator-Opal’s primary military command center for Alcatar was a sprawling underground complex, hardened against any but the worst bombardment. Even dropping a nuke on it would only take out the buildings above the ground, leaving the bulk of the site intact. “There was no one guarding it. At first, we thought the facility had been abandoned by both sides.” He paused. “We lost nine men and women getting this far. There were buzzers,” that was the Conglomerate word for the first generation of SVs, the sub-surface hunter-killers, “out in the plains and once we got inside...” He rested his hands on the table, fingers curling down to make fists. He could still hear the screams, both man and machine.

Nicholas nodded. It was what he’d suspected from the moment Lorelai had told him about OpCent back in New Berlin. The majority of the SVs that had wiped out the Alliance HQ had left, following their programming to search out more human life, but they’d left a number of units behind in case anyone showed up. The facility’s strategic value was unimportant to them, only killing humans. “Anything you hadn’t seen before?”

The Connie nodded. His lieutenant pulled a handful of circuit chips out of his pocket, and looked through them for one in particular. He threw it across the table to Nicholas. “You could say that.” The Alliance captain picked it up. Every SV had a chip like this. It was equal parts CPU and ident badge. He’d seen plenty of them. It wasn’t uncommon for soldiers to take them as trophies, like the warriors of old making a necklace of teeth. On one side was the symbol for the Mercator-Opal Alliance with an encrypted ID and scan code below it.

Insert the chip into a specially-designed reader and you could bring up a status report of everything that that particular SV had been up to. Where it had gone, other units it had interfaced with, attack operations it had carried out. In the weeks following the SVs’ release, the Connies had been desperate to get their hands on one of those readers. As far as Kawalsky knew, they never had. Until they got here.

Nicholas examined the chip. It was different than the ones designed by Alliance engineers and programmed into the queens’ fabricator systems. Rather than the original brass hue, this chip was a flat grey, and instead of a small rectangle, this was an octagon. The Alliance symbol was still present, but the lettering for Mercator-Opal Alliance Industry was replaced with some unknown script. Alliance readers could still interface with these chips, but they could only access the most basic data. Any sensitive information was locked out. None of their techs had been able to break that code wall, but Lorelai, like the other higher-end SVs, could get full access to the information on these chips.

The captain turned the chip over to examine the underside. There was a single line of script on the underside of the CPU. He couldn’t have read the letters if Lorelai hadn’t translated them for him, though he could have made an educated guess. The numbers were still human standard.

SV:MS:TBMU 01264926459.4563 638264-12

Even before the SVs had gone rogue and started changing, he couldn’t have said what that sequence of numbers actually represented. It was supposed to be a code known only to the people who’d first created the damn things, a way to not only track of which queen had produced which unit, but inventory their numbers, check on production rates and design efficacy. Obviously it couldn’t be anything straightforward or else the Conglomerate would figure it out, but Nicholas wondered if the current code code could even be recognized by the people who’d first invented it. He turned the chip back over in his hands, looking at the Alliance insignia again, laser-etched on the chip’s surface. “What did this come from?”

“Skinjob,” the lieutenant – Meers by his nametag – answered. “Type forty-four.”

“Does that mean anything to you?” D’Antonio asked. He’d caught the twitch in the Alliance captain’s eyebrow.

“Only the number,” Nicholas answered, staring at the triangular symbol of Mercator-Opal. They kept our name. He wondered about that. He also wondered why the tags had been changed to begin with, but all of that was minor compared to the new concern. Type forty-four. Type forty-fucking-four. “No one at our hive has seen anything past a 41.” He’d known they existed, but having the proof dropped in front of him hit different than being aware of a twelve-model gap between an 041 and Lorelai. He raised his head, looking between the Conglomerate soldiers. “What was it?”

“A wounded soldier,” D’Antonio answered. “It was dragging itself across the ground,” he was staring at the map, but his eyes were looking far beyond it. “Begging for help, pleading for water. It was gaunt and pallid just like a man who’d been on his own for days should be. Its voice was raspy and faint. It stunk. I remember that. It smelled like sweat, blood, fear and piss. Jones and Bartles went to help. They thought it was real – we all thought it was real – and then it wasn’t begging any more, it was screaming. Four men died before it went down.” He shook his head. “They’re getting better.”

“Yeah,” Rashid commented. “Tell me about it.”

Nicholas didn’t look at his lieutenant, but he kicked him in the shins under the table. Khatri might run his mouth more than he should, but he’d never let any professional cats out of the bag. That he was even veering towards that showed how much strain he was under. “How much of the facility do you control?”

“Not as much as you probably think,” D’Antonio replied. “Getting to that back door to respond to your breach pulled us outside our comfort zone. We don’t even hold all of the levels here in the HQ.”

The dark-haired Conglomerate captain pointed to a highlighted section of the wireframe layout. It was about a third the size of the underground sections of OpCent. “We’ve pushed this far,” he continued, “but we’ve had to block off tram lines and any access points to the other two bunkers, and keep a close eye on the doors.” He pointed to the middle fork, a passage that ran from the half-buried OpCent facility out to the fortified bunker stations. ‘Bunker’ was a bit of a misnomer. They were themselves large defensive positions, well-protected from attack. “Scout teams heard something moving around in the tunnels in this part of the base. They didn’t stick around to see what it was and we sealed the doors behind them.” D’Antonio met Nicholas’s eyes. “They said it wasn’t human and it didn’t sound like anything they’d heard before.”

“Oh, that’s fun,” Rashid murmured. “I’ve always wanted to experience man-made horrors beyond my comprehension.”

“Then these days you must be happy as a pig in shit,” Meers snapped.

“The base?” Nicholas interrupted before Rashid could offer any sort of rejoinder, trying to keep this briefing on track.

“We’re not in a bad position. We don’t go topside, but there’s food in the stores and the water recycling system is still working. We’ve got that part of the base as tight as a drumhead, and we can go to sleep being reasonably certain that we’ll get to wake up again,” D’Antonio said as his lieutenant zoomed the map in on the Conglomerate-held sections. Lorelai’s earlier comment about beating someone with a gun by killing him when he was asleep rattled through Nicholas’s head, but he shook it off, letting the Conglomerate captain continue.

Just beyond the network of buildings and underground levels that D’Antonio was indicating was the access to the comms array and the rest of the Alliance HQ facility. “This region is as secure as we can make it. We’ve had to lock down some sections ourselves, but a lot more were sealed when we got here. One door...” he paused, running his tongue over his lips. “There was a body by the lock. I don’t know what happened, but our doctor says he bled out in that room. He’d wanted to make sure that whatever was on the other side of that door stayed there.” He glanced back at the Alliance personnel.

“Some doors need to stay shut,” Nicholas agreed. He remembered one of his scavenging runs to New Berlin. In an abandoned police station he’d found a Type 016 locked inside the armoury. Sixteens were Lucys; little girls that sobbed and shivered, their frightened, desperate wails drawing you to them. They’d sniffle and ask if you could take them somewhere safe. If you said yes, they let you bring them to new people to kill. If you said no, they turned on you.

Like the Davids, they were early-model skinjobs. They weren’t as complex as Lorelai or the 30 and 40 series, but they could still fool you. The first runs of the 10 series of skinjobs were hardly seen. It was easy to tell them apart from regular humans and it seemed like only a handful had ever been released into the wild, left to wander around and kill what they could before they were destroyed.

He’d left the pleading girl inside the room. She’d never stopped begging him for help. Even knowing what she was, seeing the deep scores in the reinforced glass where she’d tried cut her way out and the long-dried bloodstains on the walls behind her, that voice had tugged at his heart.

D’Antonio nodded. “A policy we follow, captain. Nonetheless, even discounting the doors we want to leave closed, there’s a lot of ground we haven’t been able to get into. Your comm array is the prime example.” He pointed to the path that ran from the Back Door to their current location. “We managed to lift the lockdown in this part of the base when you showed up, but we haven’t been able to secure it yet. We don’t even know if it will get us into the comm center. That part of the facility is sealed tight. The connecting doors here,” several access points flashed, “here and here are locked from the inside. It’s the same with all the other ways into the array, and there’s not a lot of them. The lockdown orders came from the comm center’s network, not this part of the facility, making it harder to circumvent them.”

Nicholas nodded. When the HQ was hit, someone probably tried to seal off the comm. Maybe they’d even succeeded. For all he knew, beyond those doors were a host of scared, exhausted Alliance troops, techs and upper brass, all very grateful to be rescued and with news that relief ships were on their way.

And while I’m wishing, how about for that Commander Hellstrom Patriot Command Base I didn’t get for Christmas when I was ten?

“Given enough time,” D’Antonio was saying, “we probably could eventually batter or burn our way through, but...”

“...but that will alert anything in there and they’ll be waiting for you.” The SVs in the lowest part of the base shouldn’t know there were humans above their heads, at least until those humans started banging and blasting their way through the doors. “And not just the machines. The base has defence systems. Most of them were probably disabled during the attack, but I’m betting the array’s are still up. You try and break in to an Alliance pulse-comm and the facility will respond.”

On the other hand, if somehow, there really are people still alive in there they’ll have enough time to realize we’re human too, and prepare one hell of a welcome party! Streamers and balloons, no doubt. Candles. Cake. The whole nine.

The Patriot Command Base had a deployable mini-drone. It could launch it, just like Commander Hellstrom’s real command base launched the Eye C-877 stealth satellite in the show. Nicholas been so excited as he’d planned out all the ‘covert operations’ he’d be able to run with the toy set.

“From what we can tell, you’re right. The defences were in the bunker entrances were still online. I lost a man to them just getting through the door and those were nearly exhausted.”

“It’s bad ground in there, too,” Nicholas pointed out. He was right. The few access points that led from the HQ into the comms array were fairly narrow; they were intentional choke points – it was almost like the Alliance had built their base to repel invasion – but that it also made it a perfect killing ground for the SVs. Giving them forewarning was setting yourself up for the slaughter... if they didn’t decide to come out once they knew you were there.

“You see the problem,” D’Antonio nodded. “We can’t go in loud. We haven’t been able to crack your system to try anything quieter, so we’ve been left with salvation just out of reach.”

“Then it’s a good thing you have an Alliance officer here,” Nicholas pointed out. “I’m not one of the upper echelons, but I can get us in.” He traced the line of their passage from the Back Door up to where the Connies were squatting. “You took a risk coming out as far as you did to meet us.”

“It was either that or let potential hostiles drop in on us. All our preparations for Alliance troops were focused topside and on the bunker approaches. We never expected that you’d had another way in until the alert went off and we realized there was a very sizable hole in our base’s defences.”

“Our base,” Rashid corrected.

D’Antonio shrugged, ignoring the Alliance lieutenant’s barb. “There was a chance you were fellow APF. That would have been nice. I haven’t seen anyone since I led my people south.” He pursed his lips. “For all I know, we’re the last Conglomerate personnel left alive on Alcatar.”

Nicholas nodded. He could relate in spirit, if not in scale. The Alliance had had the hives built for a doomsday scenario, so after the bombings and A-Day, they’d been able to get more of their people to safety. The Conglomerate hadn’t been that prepared. They hadn’t realized how far they’d pushed the Alliance, nor how unwilling their opponents were to give up Alcatar and its priceless mineral wealth.

And now look at us. Two haggard officers leading the remains of military forces that had once been hundreds of thousand strong. With the hives, the Alliance probably had the numbers edge – but what good was that on a planet crawling with machines that wanted nothing more than to slaughter every single human on it? Nicholas couldn’t imagine any of the remaining Alliance officers being dumb enough to want to continue the fight. What were they going to win? The right to be the last ones slaughtered by the SVs?

With the queens buried as deep as they were, they’d survive nukes. It would take a ground incursion to destroy them and good luck with that. Nicholas didn’t know the disposition of the remaining Alliance forces, never mind that of the Conglomerate, but all of them together wouldn’t be enough to take out one queen, let alone all three, and that was assuming they could find them. The location of the queen installations had been one of the most closely-guarded secrets on this planet. There probably wasn’t a single person left alive who knew where they were. Any attempt to reclaim Alcatar was going to drown in its own blood.

If it were up to him, he’d quarantine the planet. Hell, the entire solar system! The machines could have it. They could keep it until Alcatar’s sun turned to a red giant and swallowed this cursed world whole, and then they could have the ashes. All the planet’s wealth, all the riches that the Alliance and Conglomerate had spent years killing each other for... none of it mattered any more. All that was left of either side was a handful of exhausted, frightened people. If the Alliance higher-ups and the Conglomerate wanted to keep fighting over this gore-soaked pebble, then let them find out for themselves just how much Alcatar was worth these days. “There’s not a lot of anyone left,” he agreed somberly. Between the last stages of the war and A-Day, no one even knew how much of the population was still alive. Nicholas would be surprised if it was more than one in twenty. In truth, it was probably a fair bit less than that.

“Around and around,” D’Antonio muttered. “We kill you, you kill us. Around and around. The bodies pile up, but the money keeps rolling in, so the wheel keeps turning. We both think we’re the ones driving it it, but we’re not, are we? The spokes don’t turn the wheel, they just spin and spin and spin until they break.” He closed his eyes. “I want off this ride, captain.”

“Then let’s do it. You said it yourself. We don’t have to forget or forgive, but this is our best chance – maybe our last chance – to get off this planet before that’s left of either of us is a splash of red on the walls. Now,” he said, pointing to the wireframe image, “let me show you how I think we can do that.”