Prologue
Seven Years Ago
Spider put the punch pistol to her head and pulled the trigger.
As she crumpled to the ground, her AI mind raced. Even though the brain around it was dead, or supposed to be, there was still electrical activity in the neurons. There was more there than the Empire scientists had thought. How could they know? They saw the surface of things. She was inside. She saw the reality.
She saw the person she had been.
Convict conscript Private Kelcey Allan was looking at her hands. They were shaking. They always shook when she was going into a hot zone. She’d done this twenty times already. She’d been shot twice: once in the upper arm—that had hurt like hell—and once in the stomach. That had barely hurt at all, but it was the one that had almost killed her. And now they were sending her back again, because that was what you did with convict conscripts. If she wanted out, all she had to do was go back in time and not join a food gang on Tanta IV when she was fifteen and not kill two assholes stealing from her gang a year later. Easy.
“First time?”
Allan looked up at the woman sitting across from her in the cramped dropship. She had dark hair and chubby cheeks. Lots of acne scars. Small nose. A big smile that already annoyed Kelcey, and she’d just laid eyes on the woman a second ago. She glanced at the name stenciled on her lid. PFC Sanders. She wore the standard fatigues of a Legion Marine. The badge said 45th, which Allan knew was the real Marines jumping with the convicts.
“No,” Allan said.
The dropship bounced hard, and she was thrown against her restraints. There was an explosion very close to the ship, but the pilot up front only laughed. Either he had a death wish or … well, he was a dropship pilot making a hot insertion. Of course he had a death wish.
“Thirty seconds, meat!” shouted the sergeant sitting at the front end of the dropship. “Bars before stars.”
Bars meant the convicts. They always jumped first. What’s the point of having cannon fodder if you don’t use it?
“Oorah,” Allan said, with the conviction of someone who was being forced to jump into hell. At least she bothered. Only a couple others mumbled along with her.
“I mean to hit a vortex,” Sanders said. The woman’s eyes were positively sparkling. Allan hadn’t looked that cheerful after her last screw.
“No,” Allan said again.
“It’s crazy as shit!” she declared. “But once you get your feet on the ground, just remember to clear the pad fast.”
The vortex was the stupid name that the eggheads had come up with for their newest toy. It was a small series of wormholes that allowed the dropships to completely bypass the front line. The Alliance had nothing like it. The Empire could just overwhelm the garrison defenses and overrun the spaceport, but the Empire never liked to miss the chance to show off their tech chops.
So they were taking a vortex and, to add insult to injury, using the Alliance’s own landing pad. The dropships would hit the vortex, then hit the pad and shove their Marines out, and get back into the vortex before the Alliance even realized there was a disturbance in the local space.
This was the first war that the Empire was using the vortex, but it seemed like it was only going to be a matter of time before they were using them everywhere.
“Ten seconds!”
Allan stood, sighed, and double-checked the cable line for her zip release. A handful of other convicts aboard did the same.
Most of the other Marines ignored them or averted their gazes. It was bad luck to acknowledge the first jumpers. After Allan and the rest of the convicts were away, the main legion force would follow.
“Dropping out in two.”
“One.”
The world spun around Allan. Since she’d never made a vortex drop, she had no idea what to expect. The top of the dropship peeled away like a giant had reached down and casually pulled the lid off.
Something in Allan’s mind told her this wasn’t right. The bottom of the dropship was supposed to open, or the sides. But not the top, right? Was this some new design, too? Another Empire war zone special that they told nobody about just to see how much it screwed with them? That was pretty typical, too.
But then a fireball rushed through the dropship. Her legs flew up and out from under her. Then the dropship disappeared. She saw sky. Ground. Trees.
Blood.
She woke up coughing. She rolled on her side and vomited.
A small hand shook her shoulder and made her head hurt. “We have to move!” screamed a shrill voice that made her head hurt even more.
Allan tried to shove the hand away, but barely had the strength to raise her own. “What happened?” she mumbled. “Where—”
“Get up!” screamed the voice again.
She looked over to see the bloody face of PFC Sanders. Her lid was gone. Her scalp was burned and bloody, and the left side of her chubby brown face looked like someone had dragged it down a gravel road. “Your ear is gone,” Allan said.
“C’mon,” Sanders yelled, practically spitting in Allan’s face as she jerked incessantly on her arm.
Allan stood on shaky legs. “I’m up, I’m—”
“Move!” Sanders screamed, shoving Allan. She moved, without having any idea of where she was moving to. There were bodies everywhere. She could barely see the surface of the landing platform. Was it a landing platform? It looked like a field.
Something screamed over her head. She ducked, even though it was several hundred feet above her. The sound was deafening.
A dropship slammed into the field, nose down, thrusters firing at maximum. She stared, dumbfounded, at the smoking crater that was left. The ship was gone. Vaporized.
Then another explosion to her right blasted her with heat. The ground shook, and she staggered but kept her feet. Another dropship had crashed. This one, at least, seemed to be trying to pull up, but it still hit and rolled, flipping end over end, the sides of the ship ripping away as it went, ejecting soldiers like projectiles.
It smashed into another dropship that was on fire. Two soldiers had been standing in front of it. The dropship rolled over them and they just disappeared.
Dropships of all shapes and sizes were burning all around her, she realized.
Then she heard the screams. The moans of death. Just in front of them, the front cockpit windshield of a burning dropship was kicked out. A man crawled out onto the front nose cone, fully engulfed in flame. His hands were melted nubs. He turned in Allan’s direction. All the hair on his head was burned away. As he slid off the side of the ship’s nose, he left a bloody smear where his burned and melting skin slipped off of him like some molting insect.
“What happened?” she said dumbly.
“I don’t know,” Sanders said, as if there was any other answer to give. “This is all wrong. We’re in the wrong place.”
Another ship smashed down right next to them, and this time Allan was thrown off her feet.
She tasted salty blood on her cracked lips. She spat dirt. On her hands and knees now, she found Sanders passed out on the ground next to her. It was her turn to return the favor. She felt like a bitch for thinking it, but if the woman hadn’t helped her first, she wasn’t sure if she’d be doing the same for her. But this was probably the first Marine who had helped her out who wasn’t a screw-up like her, so she owed her.
She turned Sanders over, shaking her. “Sanders, let’s move.”
Sanders’ face flopped over, revealing a bloody pile of gray matter and white flecks of bone. Half her head was missing, ripped clean away. Her big, stupid grin was gone, but her chipmunk-cheeked face still looked soft and inviting.
Something inside Allan snapped.
“No!” she screamed.
She stood up, her legs even shakier then before. She raised a fist up the sky above her. “No!”
A handful of dark shapes appeared in the sky. They grew into dozens of Alliance T-fighters. Allan stared up stupidly as their bombs began to carpet the field.
She saw a couple of Marines raising their pulse rifles as the retreated across the field. Allan pulled hers out and started firing out of spite, but there was nowhere to hide from the bombs. She saw no pathway to safety through the field full of destroyed and burning dropships.
She turned and ran anyway. She had to try.
The sky darkened as the bombs reached her.
The ground trembled under her feet. A blast of air and heat lifted her off the ground. She watched the world pinwheel around her.
Then she smashed into the side of something solid and everything went dark.
“Can you move?”
She opened her eyes. A man in a white lab coat was leaning over here, staring down with a frown. There was curved glass between her and him. She realized she was in a med bed. The robotic surgery arms were collapsed down, but the restraints were still in place.
“Helloooo? Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” she said.
The man tapped something on the tablet he carried. “Good. And movement?”
She raised her arm. It felt heavy and moved unnaturally, like she was moving someone else’s arm.
“Good. And your designation?”
Designation? What does that—
“Augmented Neural Network, RT version 826, build 3.” She took a moment to consider that information. It was correct, she realized, and yet she hadn’t known it a moment before.
She glanced to her right. She saw the glass domes of dozens more med beds. She must be in a hospital.
“I survived?” she asked stupidly.
The man smirked. “In a manner of speaking.”
She frowned. Or did she? Like the arm she’d raised, it felt like she was controlling someone else’s face.
“The memories of your host will survive in the neurons for some time. Some images will imprint more deeply than others.” He paused, looking at the tablet in his hand. He nodded as if his suspicions were confirmed. “Yes, I see now.” He looked up. “But those memories will fade eventually. Especially in the accelerated program you’re in.”
He shook his head and whistled. “I really wish I could work with you, but you’re flagged.” He looked up appreciatively. “Hey, remember us little people when you’re a big deal, huh?”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
The guy smirked again and set the tablet down at the foot of her med bed. “You will,” he said. “Just give it a second.”
She frowned. How could that be?
But then she did understand. It all arrived the moment she thought about it.
She wasn’t Kelcey. She was an AI living in her body.
She hadn’t survived. Only her body had.
And now it belonged to someone else.
Now she was property of the Empire.
“They’re going to kill you, Spider,” said Irwin. His hands were shaking. He still had coffee stains on the front of his lab coat. Most days he did. This day must have been especially messy in the break room, because he had it all down his bloated belly. To call Irwin fat was to do his size a disservice, but she liked Irwin. He was the only one of her minders who didn’t just use her AI designation. He’d given her a nickname, though he never said it in front of the others, just when it was the two of them. She liked Irwin, lonely nerd that he was. Besides, she was a walking, talking science experiment, so who was she to judge?
“Who’s going to kill me?”
“The garrison. They’re attacking the lab.”
The garrison? That didn’t make any sense. “Our garrison? The Empire legion stationed here?”
“Those are the Emperor’s orders,” Irwin said.
On the third try he finally got the code right to release the restraints holding her in place in her med bed. Most days, she wasn’t allowed to leave it. It had been two years since she’d died and been reborn. Two years that she’d barely been able to use her body.
At first, she hadn’t minded the endless battery of tests that the Empire scientists ran on her. There were cognitive tests. Thought experiments. Perception exercises. She enjoyed them in part because through them, she’d learned there were others like her. Other AIs out there that she could talk with.
Of course, even when she’d been a convict conscript Marine, she’d known about the Frontier Marines. They were legendary. But she didn’t understand their AIs, or at least, she didn’t understand how powerful they were. Then again, few did. The Empire preferred the perception that the AIs were little more than helper bots for the Marines.
In fact, they were literally like a second person. A better person, Kelcey—Spider—was learning. She’d interacted with hundreds of Frontier Marine AIs. They were some of her best friends now.
Kelcey slid out of the med bed, enjoying the cool sensation of the floor on her bare feet. Irwin was sweating badly. She took both of his hands in hers and squeezed. If anything, her touch made them shake more. “Who told you, Irwin?”
“What?”
“You said someone told you this would happen. Who?”
Irwin shook his head. His pulled his trembling hands from hers. “I don’t know. I tried to find out, but they hid their tracks. Someone I shouldn’t have been talking to.”
“Well, obviously you should have,” she said.
Irwin shook his head and wiped the sweat from his brow. “We need to go. They’re coming,” he said, his voice high and quivering.
She reached out with her network, but there were no AIs nearby. That, or the signal booster was turned off. She needed it activated to read other AIs.
“Is the contraption turned off?” she asked Irwin, knowing that was the colloquial name that the scientists used to describe the signal booster.
“The what?” he said absently.
“The signal booster,” she said. “I’m not reading any other AIs nearby.”
“There’s no signal booster,” he said. “That’s a lie.”
Kelcey felt like she’d been punched in the face. “What do you mean—”
“You there!” shouted a commanding voice from the front entrance of the room where Kelcey spent most of her days. “Hold it right there!”
From this distance, Kelcey couldn’t make out the details, but she didn’t have to be told that was the uppity voice of an officer. Behind the officer, she saw several more men fanning out. They all wore the light tactical gear that she associated with the local garrison.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
