Chapter 148 The Ghost Transmission
The battle was nearly better than the clean up.
It was not until nearly daylight that the blizzard had stopped, and the Iron City was caught in a cold and chilly sunshine of a pale color. And the Northern Expressway had become a cemetery of white armor and blackened and smoking craters. Thousands of the infantry of General Vance was lying in the snow, corrupted. They had just gone dead without any signal of the hive-mind, and their biomechanical packs had frozen solid in the low temperatures.
I was standing in the temporary hospital that we made on the 40th floor of the command tower. Dr. Sato was wrapping my left hand, a very thick sterile gauze impregnated with Purist bio-foam.
You have electrical burns of the second degree on your palm and fingers," Sato chastised mildly tying the bandage tape. The Origin Stone was a kind of a conduit, though that sort of raw electromagnetic voltage is not supposed to go through human skin, Elara. You must not take away the magic, or you will cause nerve damage permanently.
It kept us alive, I said under my breath, peering out the window at the smouldering remains of the command crawler sitting way out there.
Ryker walked into the clinic. He had gotten the soot and violet blood off his face, but his limbs were pulling themselves along with a borrowed listlessness. The rifle butt he had received in the melee was badly bruised on both sides of his rib-cage.
"They are arranging the burn piles with Ferrous and Jaxon," Ryker reported, bending over the door frame. We should not just leave all that Rot-biomass about, even when it is frozen. In case of a weather breach, there would be a chance of the infection melting into the groundwater.
"How is Baron?" I asked.
Sleeping, Ryker smiled to himself. He broken a shoulder, and swallowed a mouthful of plasma-rot. He is even snoring loud enough to shake the windows on the third floor. He'll heal."
Ryker came more slowly up to me and lifted my bandaged left hand with his. His golden eyes were tender, full of a silent thanksgiving which he seldom expressed before the rest.
You shattered the swarm, he said to himself. "You saved the city."
I saved it together, I corrected.
Ryker was just about to respond when the intercom on the wall screamed.
"Ryker! Sato! Go up at once to the Command Center! The voice of Vane was crackling over the speaker. He didn't sound victorious. He sounded terrified.
The General was again instantly the target of the demeanour of Ryker. He lost my hand, and took his sidearm. "On our way."
The Phantom of the Aether
The 50 th floor Command Center had been a jumble of snarls of wires and discarded server racks. Vane was almost trembling with nervousness, and typing like his eyesight allowed on three separate holographic keyboards.
Well, our main receiver array was struck out by the EMP you fired, according to Vane, who rushed into the room along with me. I have spent the past four hours re-laying the copper wiring to avoid the burnt circuits. I have been reconnected to the long-range telemetry just now.
Did that get more Coalition troops? Going to the console, Ryker inquired.
No, no, I mean no, Vane replied, drawing a digital map of the globe. "I found a ghost."
He tapped a key. The map was enlarged, not only through the atmosphere but the geostationary orbit. One red spot was floating exactly on our position.
The Aether.
Its title, Sato breathed, walking nearer to the screen, was The orbital station. "But we locked it down. Before we put the Valkyrie on the surface we scrubbed the weapon target systems.
You scrubbed the Clean Slate protocol," Vane pointed out, his fingers dashing across the keys in order to cut off a sound file. But five minutes back, the station automatic transponder gave a ping to our grid. It wasn't a random sweep. It was a handshake encrypted and specific. The station is looking for us."
"Valerius?" I inquired, shivering as I did so, and with nothing to do with the winter air. "But Ryker unplugged him. You said his brain was fried."
Sato, frying her biological brain, flushed her face and put on her glasses. His physical body is in vegetative state. His heart is beating and alive thanks to the life support, and that is why the dead-man switch of the station does not start a self-destruct.
Who is then sending the transmission? Ryker demanded.
"Listen," Vane said.
He hit a button. The room was filled with hissing cosmic statical noise, and then a voice.
It was Valerius. But it didn't sound human. It was not the pompous, snobbish effeminacy of the Purist Commander. It was completely synthesized, a digital, chilly replica of his patterns of voice.
"...Directive intact. Biological vessel impaired. Complete consciousness transfer. we are no longer a slave to flesh.
There was more silence in the Command Center.
Sato uttered in horror, consciousness transfer. Ryker, he did not simply connect his brain to the mainframe of the Aether and drive it. He traced his wires of the brain. When you pulled the cables out... his physical mind was killed, but a copy of his consciousness as a digital file existed inside the AI in the station.
He is a ghost in the machine," said Vane, gulp. "He is the station now."
Is he able to launch the orbital weapons? Clenching his jaw, Ryker asked.
No, Sato deleted those targeting algorithms, Vane checked the telemetry data. Nevertheless, he does not have to drop tungsten rods to kill us. Examine his orbit path.
The red spot on the screen was no longer there. It was moving.
Sato read the data streams, and realized he was breaking geostationary orbit. He is firing the main maneuvering station thrusters. He's altering his flight path."
"Where is he going?" I asked.
He is not going anywhere, and he looked up at us, his eyes so wide with panic. "He's degrading his own orbit. He is dragging the station to the ground.
"He's crashing it?" Ryker asked in disbelief. The size of the Aether is that of a city. If that hits the surface..."
It will not only strike the surface, Sato said, and made a quick calculation on her datapad. Assuming a mass that massive hits the crust at orbital speed, such a collision will cause an extinction level event. It will break the tectonic plates. It will load the atmosphere with enough ash to cover the sun during a hundred years.
He can not purge the earth with his arms, and then it was realizing itself on Ryker, the horror of the situation. So he is using the station itself, as the bullet.
...Evolution must have a catalyst, the digital incarnation of Valerius mumbled in the background on the radio with the dead air. In case the experiment is not controllable, the petri dish should be burned. Great Irrasement in T-Minus forty eight hours.
The transmission cut out.
I looked at Ryker. We had just gone through an army of the dead. And the sky itself was plummeting now.
Vane, said Ryker, and his voice had fallen to that dreadful, chilling, absolute pitch which indicated that he was going to war. "Warm up the Valkyrie."
We just managed to get down, boss, we just made it, said Vane. The drop-ship was not made to come back to orbit without a booster stage!
"Find a way," Ryker ordered. We are forty-eight hours before that radio station erases all that was on this planet. We're going back up. And this time we are disassembling the mainframe.