Fit for Duty
By
Eric S. Brown
The
pen floated away from Clarkson’s hand as his body drifted backwards towards the
wall behind his desk. A trail of tiny
red globules stretched from where he had stood to the hole in his forehead.
Dirk
watched in fascination at the apparent slow motion of it all. His heavy mag-boots clomped on the metal of
the floor as he walked over to the desk and sorted through the paperwork
Commander Clarkson had been working on.
He flipped through it until he found the transfer order. His teeth grinded in his mouth in anger as
he read over it. He’d expected it but
had hoped nonetheless that it wouldn’t come to the point where it had now. Waste fumes still lingered around the barrel
of the gauss weapon clutched in his right hand. He waved them away as he calmly said “Gravity on,” to the empty room. Clarkson’s body and blood dropped to the
floor with a loud thud and wet splashing sounds. Dirk disengaged his mag-boots and walked towards the office’s
exit. “One down,” he muttered to
himself, “Three to go.”
Sarah
was working in hydroponics when he found her.
Her long blond hair spilled over her shoulders as she leaned beside a
row of roses she had planted in addition to the station’s normal required
crops, checking the soil temp. The
whole idea of growing food naturally seemed redundant to Dirk on a state of the
art station equipped with molecular rearrangers that could produce the same
material in seconds, besides if the power ever failed, starving to death would
be the least of one’s worries.
Sarah
had heard the hiss of the doorway dilating open as he entered and had rose to
greet him but her normally cheerful “hello” had turned into a scream as she saw
the blood splattered on his uniform and the weapon in his hand. He opened up sending a stream of super
sonic, gas-projected needles into her mid-section. She toppled to the floor, curling up in a ball against the pain
as pool of her fluids spread out around her.
Dirk sniffed at the smell of urine and blood as he moved towards
her.
Sarah
tried to crawl away from him but her attempt at movement shifted the needles
inside of her and she blacked out from the pain as tears burned in her pleading
eyes. Dirk pressed the cold metal of
the barrel against the flesh of her face and pulled the trigger.
Two
decks above, Ben was having other kinds of problems. He’d been attending his
normal upkeep of the station’s AI and computer core when something had slammed
him out of the network and back into his own body. He shook his head trying to recover from the shock. He leaned over and checked his datajack in
the neural interface node and tried again to enter. This time his pathway was blocked by a wall of encryption codes
so complex they would take him an hour or more to break through. He disengaged and rocked back in his
chair. “What the hell is going on?” he
muttered. “Computer,” he said, trying
a different approach, “ I need access to node 311 Zeta.” The room remained silent but for his own
breathing. He leapt up from his seat
and rushed over to check the AI’s audio circuits that allowed it to communicate
vocally with the crew anywhere abroad the station. Had it been anyone other
then Ben, they may have not have the notice the small burn marks on the circuit
boards. Someone had disabled the
computer’s vocal capabilities while leaving it open to still be able to respond
to their commands internally.
“Jesus,”
Ben whispered. Someone had bloody well
sabotaged the system. There was no
other explanation. He felt his hand
reach instinctively for the sidearm he had carried on his belt when he had first
arrived on the station month before.
His fingers brushed the empty space on his tool belt and he berated
himself for becoming complacent. He was
the damn security officer after all. He
slammed his fist into a random console in a rage, and darted out of the
computer core on a direct line for his quarters still wondering what in the
hell was going on.
Hank
had snuck away from the station prime.
He sat in an airlock on the station’s out ring, rolling a
cigarette. Having Sarah grow him some
illegal tobacco was one his better ideas, he thought. He missed the freedoms of Earth but at least out here on the
station’s ring he could still indulge himself without anyone being the wiser. He could smoke in peace and then just vent
the leftovers out into space without contaminating the station’s whole
atmosphere. He popped the cigarette
between his lips and lit it with a pale blue flame from the top of his wielding
torch with it set to its lowest cutting mode.
Structural engineers would always have a home on stations like this one
whether they liked it or not.
A
shadow passed over the view port of the lock door on the station side. Cussing under his breath, Hank nearly burnt
himself snubbing out the smoke and cramming the butt into the pocket of his
uniform. He hopped up on his knees and
made like he was working on the outer door’s opening mechanism. When no one entered he turned to see Dirk
smiling at him through the seaport. He
raised his hand to wave as the door opened sending Hank sprawling out into the
cold blackness beyond.
Ben’s
quarters were chaos. Computer pieces
and junk lay everywhere. Ben swept the
holo-projector he’d been building from his desk and plopped down into the
room’s only chair in front of his security station console. He shoved his datajack into the interface
hoping against hope the saboteur hadn’t remembered about this direct access
point to the AI’s core. Colors swirled
around in his perceptions as his mind plunged into the machine. Then suddenly everything changed. Waves upon waves of pain struck him as the
AI howled in the silence of electrical space.
Viruses were everywhere attacking it from every point and it pulled him
like a maelstrom. “Murder!” the AI
wailed over and over as its consciousness intermingled with his own. Ben fought to get free but the collapsing
pathway’s cyber-undertow was too great.
He became one with the AI in an even deeper sense as the viruses ate
them/it alive.
Dirk
sat on the edge of Ben’s bed. The lock
to his room had been easy enough to override.
He stared at the officer’s twitching mindless form still plugged into
the core, and laughed. It was over
now. They wouldn’t be sending him home
after all. He was alone now, the only
living human in the whole sector and abroad the station. Forging reports back to Earth command would
prove easy enough. Space was his and
his alone out here. He chuckled to
himself knowing he was fit for all the other duties that lay ahead.