David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

Virginia laughed. Halley’s north pole had become a festival —bumping into mechs, which uncomplainingly swerved to avoid more-violent collisions. Percells pirouetted with Orthos. Spacers talked excitedly with Arcists. Someone piped music over D-channel, and the weird, twisting dance of near-zero gravity filled the sky.

It doesn’t take much… just a little good news.

From one agro dome, a dozen spindly children stared… some slack-jawed and barely seeing, but a few clapping their hands and tugging at the sleeves of nearby adults, pointing excitedly at the boisterous celebration.

A figure appeared beside Virginia’s mech and reached up to tug on the machine’s arm. Virginia felt it at her own elbow and looked down.

“Oh. Hi Carl!” She felt like a little girl, and it was good to see him smile again, under the glossy faceplate of his grimy suit. “How did you know which mech was me?”

—Osborn to Herbert, channel AF. How did I know, Virginia? It was easy. I just watched the way each mech walked, and picked the one with the sexiest moves.—

She felt herself blush, and was glad that out on the surface none of it would show. “You always did have a gift for bullsh.”

Suddenly, Virginia was interrupted by an awful sound. It was the blood-chilling wail of a suit-rupture alarm, interrupting every channel, cutting through the celebration, and stopping all chatter in mid-breath.

“Oh my gosh. Where… ?” She whirled her mech to look. Already several of the most sophisticated models were charging toward a crowd of spectators, drawn now into a cluster near one of the agro domes.

“I can’t tell,” she started to say to Carl. But then she realized that he was already gone-launched in a propellant spray toward the site of the commotion.

The alarm cut off abruptly, dropping to a low, mournful drone that denoted cessation of life functions.

Somebody had died.

Virginia started moving toward the crowd, then stopped, feeling foolish. Of course she did not have to take this particular mech over there to get a closer look. With a tongue click and a pulsed subvocal command, she transferred her point of view to a tall, spidery drone standing over the cluster of muttering humans.

She was looking down, then. Carl and Jeffers bent over a spacesuited figure sprawled prone on the ground. The suit was slit open down to bone. Red foam still spread from the gaping opening like a gruesome fog.

Keoki Anuenue and some of his big Hawaiians arrived. They started pushing the crowd back, ordering unnecessary mechs away. The suddenly subdued crowd drifted off, all of the festival mood taken out of them like a noisy stream turned to rock-hard ice.

“He Kiai,” she sent to the dark-faced Polynesian who tried to usher off her observer mech. The man blinked in surprise. Then he shrugged.

— Ua make oia, wahine. —

Virginia did not need to be told that the figure on the ice was dead. Obviously, it was pointless even to think of slotting.

Her mouth went dry as she saw the slim-bladed vibro-knife lying next to the corpse. Whoever had done this—taking advantage of the confusion and excitement she and Jeffers had brought about—had left his calling card alongside his handiwork.

She sorted through the comm automatically, searching for the channel and encryption Carl and Jeff were using. At last she found the right combination.

—… going to be hell to pay for this. Quiverian and Ould-Harrad are sure to capitalize on it.—

—Shit. Malcolm might have been an officious bastard, and an Ortho chauvinist. But at least he wasn’t an Arcist. I could work with him. You know who’s gonna get blamed for this, of course…—

They turned the victim over. The face of poor Malcolm stared up at her, bloated and bug-eyed from decompression.

Virginia shut down quickly and pulled out of the mech. She opened her real eyes and found herself back in her own small, safe realm deep under the ice. She removed her neural tap and groaned as she sat up, rubbing the raw area at the back of her head.

Oh yes, she thought. There will be hell to pay over this.

Virginia got up and went to the tiny, hooded water tap to dampen a towel and wipe her face.

Her scalp still hurt. She lifted her hair and bent over between the mirrored surfaces of two holo tanks to examine the neural-tap-contact area. An angry red rash was spreading, and the standard treatments didn’t seem to be working, this time. Saul had told her that he felt he might be able to come up with a new approach, but he had not been able to hide from her his anxious uncertainty.

It didn’t take a genius to see that they were all dying.

She thought of the giddy celebration above, so brief, so quickly shattered.

It was nice to feel hope, for a few minutes, at least.

Color flashed above her. She looked up as letters coalesced in the computer’s main display tank. Ohno. It was another of JonVon’s eerie, spontaneous attempts at versification… another sign that decay had not limited itself to men and moving machines.

The figures moved single file across the pitted landscape, linked together by knotted ropes. They stepped carefully, slowly, as they pushed and dragged their burdens over hummocks and crater rims.

It was a silent exodus—shapes in grimy, patched spacesuits, struggling with massive bundles, nearly weightless but cumbersome with inertia—helping each other through fields of fine, black dust, probing to avoid places where it was several meters thick. Elsewhere, they had to brave slick, icy patches and even a few dangerous fields of explosive, amorphous ice.

From Virginia’s vantage point, atop one of Halley’s highest equatorial prominences, the horizon of their tiny world was an arc only a mile or so away… close enough almost to touch. Those below would have to cover only twenty kilometers or so, between the northern base and the caves on the comet’s other pole. And yet, watching the Arcist migration, she felt as if she were witnessing something biblical. The self-styled refugees scrambled, heaved, and turned to help one another as they carried their possessions toward the new homes that their leaders had promised them.

They had been offered mechs to help, but it was widely known that the sophisticated roboids had been rebuilt by Jeffers and reprogrammed by Virginia… both Percells. The Arcists’ suspicious natures won over convenience, so they refused all but the simplest machines.

Three spacesuited men stood on the prominence alongside Virginia’s new mech, also watching the Arcists depart. Carl and Jeffers touched helmets and spoke to each other in private, gesturing at the line of shuffling figures. On her other side, Saul leaned against her mech’s flank, humming an absent tune, low and atonal.

The biblical flavor of the scene was heightened by the figure leading the single-file caravan. There, in front, using a staff as he strode in long, slow steps, was Suleiman Ould-Harrad—once Lieutenant Colonel in the Space Service, now a mystic and spiritual adviser to the Arcist clans. The tall black man had dyed his suit deep midnight blue, and his tabard was white with a single black star.

Behind him, carrying huge burdens or drawing giant, floating sledges, followed scores—from oldsters too long out of the slots to wide-eyed children, spindly and staring from inside plastic survival bubbles.

—At lest thirty more Orthos joined then after Malcolm’s assassination, —Carl muttered, perhaps unaware that Virginia could pick up his words through vibrations in the ice. —We have no way of knowing who actually did it, but I can tell you who profited.—