A. Attanasio - SoliS

With a reptilian rasp, its tentacles score the wall she had climbed moments earlier, tasting her path. The floodlights dim, and only the ruby purple of its heat-seeker eyes shines in the gloom. A viper's hiss scalds the remnant nitrogen gas that the processor has used to lubricate the bore hole, and the demolition androne concludes it has detected relict heat lingering in the ducts from the recently shut-down factory.
Mei slowly and quietly backs her way through the duct. The sight of Aparecida has left her heart slamming in her chest, and when the duct opens above a large cavern, she leaps gratefully into the darkness. Knees bent, she floats downward, waiting for the bottom to arrive. She is glad when she lands in a soft, dusty mound that swallows her. This, she knows, is a soot dump, and after routing around in the heaped cinders for a while, she finds her way up the opposite rock wall to a conveyer chute that will lead her by an alternate path back toward the processor.
She ascends along the steep track, clambering over trucks filled with charred dross. An azure shine leaks through the darkness from ahead, and she kills the glow of her statskin cowl and edges forward crouching between the trucks and the rough-hewn rock wall of the chute. Ahead, the core chamber comes into view, a luminously transparent geodesic under a mammoth vault of groined stone.
Feeling the wall for vibrations and peering cautiously out of the chute without detecting any sign of Aparecida, Mei enters the huge vault and approaches the bright geodesic chamber. She goes directly to the access panel and uses her jetpak tools to begin loosening the sealing bolts. Peering inside as she works, she sees the gleaming twin towers of the giant power coils, dormant now but still radiant with seething energy. A gauzy aura of blue force illuminates between the towers the command pod, a compact, iridescent complex of fused mirror spheres, silver-gold vanes, and ribbon antennae. That is the nucleus of the factory, where Charles Outis is installed.
Mei turns the last bolt, but when she tries to pry loose the access panel, abruptly all the bolts spin back into place.
A mechanical voice shouts from the tiny com-link speakers in her cowl: "Halt! If you proceed any further, I will detonate the bore-drill explosives!"
"Mr. Charlie?" Mei calls and turns on the light inside her cowl so that her face can be better seen from outside. Arms outspread, she presses against the clear panel. "Can you hear me?"
"I hear and I see you." A psybot half her height trundles out from behind the nearest of the towering power coils, a swivel-turreted torso of green metal sliding toward her on tractor treads. Mounted atop the pincer-armed torso, two stalk-eye lenses watch her. Though the device appears crude, Mei knows otherwise, for it contains a neural mesh and psyonic receptor that allow it to interface with Charles Outis's brain, extending his senses into the environment. That Wolf Star would deploy such an expensive machine, which is usually reserved for clandestine work with dangerous rival companies, attests to their eagerness to salvage this wetware. "Are you Aparecida?"
"No." She glances apprehensively over her shoulder, afraid to be caught in the open by the demolition androne. "My name is Mei Nili. I'm here to warn you that Aparecida is not your ally. I don't know what you've been told, but she is here to salvage your brain for wetware. Do you understand?"
"Who sent you?"
"No one. We heard your transmission-that is, Munk did, the androne I work with. He's waiting in a magjet cruiser not far from this rock. If you broadcast that I'm here, he'll break radio silence and announce us."
The psybot stares silently at her with its faceted lenses. Though Charles is apparently controlling the machine, she is well aware that it is an Ares Bund device and will certainly respond to their commands as well. The hopelessness of Munk's scheme suddenly presses heavily on her, and she feels trapped between the Bund's psybot on the other side of the geodesic wall and Aparecida behind her. Nervously, she stares across the amply lit vault to the dark tunnel rutted by the passage of numerous drilling machines.
Munk's broadcast echoes dimly, like cricket noise, from her com-link. She distantly hears him declare the Bund's true intent and the willingness of The Laughing Life to take Charles away from here to Solis, where a new body may be cloned for him. Munk tells him about the Maat's C-P programming and how Mei Nili and the androne need the archaic brain to gain entry to Solis for themselves but says nothing about controlling the function codes of Phoboi Twelve.
This new input bewilders Charles, and he paces back and forth in the psybot. So long in the virtual space of the ore processor's core chamber, he is grateful simply to be able to move about and see the grainy, blue-and-white images the psybot affords him. But right now he wants to close these eyes that cannot close and diffuse his consciousness so that he can think through what he has been told and decide how best to respond to this woman-the first human he has seen since he died.
But events are not waiting for him. At this very moment, Wolf Star is also receiving the news of their trespass, and Mei dreads– the commands that will be sent to Aparecida. A grating sound commences from inside the tunnel, and as she is considering edging back toward the conveyer chute while Charles ponders Munk's message, the psybot swivels alert.
"I'm confused," the mechanical voice says.
"Of course," Mei replies in the most compassionate tone she can muster. "That's why I've come to you. I'm human, too. These others are andrones-artificial beings. But I have lived on Earth as once you did. Please, let me in. If Aparecida catches me out here, I'll be killed."
The psybot's eye-stalks strain forward, practically touching the transparent panel. "You're beautiful. Oh. I didn't mean to say that. I mean-I thought that-I … I didn't mean to say it out loud. I'm not used to … this machine."
"That's okay, Mr. Charlie. Everyone is beautiful now. It's in the programming of the vats that grow us. They will make you beautiful, too." The scraping sound grinds louder, and the mouth of the tunnel brightens. "Please, let me in!"
The psybot whirs backward. "I need time to think."
"There is no time!" Mei anxiously turns to face the clangor in the tunnel. "Aparecida is coming! Please."
"This is happening too fast," Charles complains. "I must get used to this machine first. You're confusing me."
Out of the tunnel, Aparecida appears, slouched under shoulder-wing torchlights, her slinky length spike-studded, sleek as a moray eel with a long, curved, genitally blunt head and a razorous brow ridge hooding lenses of molten embers. She slides closer. Glint-toothed tentacles lash the ground ahead of her like shock ripples in water.
Mei slaps on her com-link to The Laughing Life and shouts, "Munk! Open the core chamber's port-side access hatch' Now!"
Bolts spin, the panel slips aside, and Mei jumps backward into the geodesic chamber. Manually, she heaves the panel back into place.
"How did you do that?" Charles asks in a fright.
Before she can answer, the psybot whisks forward, and its pincers grab her legs and slam her to the ground. "Hey!" she cries. "Stop that!"
"It's not me!" Charles calls. "I'm not doing it."
The pincers jab at Mei's statskin cowl, and she twists and contorts, using a desperate agility to avoid their stabbing blows. With a mighty heave, she lurches free of her jetpak as the psybot seizes her collar and tears at her flightsuit. Her hands fumble with the ignitor, and the jetpak flares a blue burst that bangs Mei against the wall and knocks the psybot to its side, tractor treads running.
Charles squawks, "Stop it!"
Mei shakes off the stardust sprinkling her vision and, wielding the jetpak as a weapon, strides over to the psybot. With controlled spurts that make her flesh hop on her bones, she cuts away the androne's pincer appendages and lower body. Hoisting the upper segment of the psybot by a writhing eye-stalk, she bounds away as Aparecida's slashing tentacles smash the geodesic wall behind her into a blizzard of sparkling motes.
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