“Okay,” I said. “The warehouse, please.”
The door slid open. I stepped into the warehouse.
There had been no time to move Mary Ping’s body. She still lay on the floor, flooded with diffuse industrial light, in a pool of drying blood. I didn’t let myself look away as I neared. Didn’t let myself look away when I stood over her.
I had thought, when I first saw her, that it was hard to imagine her beating a man to death in a rage. But looking down at her bloodied corpse, with the skin singed and ribs cracked open and insides revealed, it was not hard to imagine at all. David had wanted to know what Parthenope was hiding, and Mary Ping had promised to show him. Agreed to meet him in the airlock, as long as he disabled the surveillance. Promised to bring him a vac suit so they might step outside. He had suspected that Parthenope was building weapons of war. I knew now that fear and disgust were what I had heard in his voice in the message to me.
She had killed him to protect the AI hiding in the UEN base. But I still didn’t know why it had killed her. I didn’t even know if it was reasonable to ask why. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of stories about martial AIs that had gone very, very wrong. Maybe this was another example of the same: an artificial intelligence designed to kill, so it killed, and it was as simple as that.
Her blood filled the air with a stale, metallic odor that turned my stomach as I walked away.
I was halfway through the warehouse when I heard the first spider.
There was a whisper-soft clatter of metal on metal, just loud enough to carry over the peel of my gecko soles and rasp of my breath. I froze for half a beat, then turned quickly, searching frantically, and glimpsed a flash of silver at the edge of my vision. I flinched, lurched away from it, and began to run.
The spider raced along the wall of the container behind me. Before I’d made it even three meters, there was a pricking sensation on my shoulder. The spider had jumped. The ratfucking thing had jumped, and now it was clinging to my upper arm. My left arm, with no flesh for it to grab, but its legs were clinging to the sleeve of my shirt.
I shook my arm frantically, and when that failed to dislodge it, I reached for it with my right hand. It scampered down my arm toward my exposed prosthetic hand. Its clever little legs wrapped themselves around the metal joint of my wrist, and I felt a spark, followed by a sudden and nauseating wave of pressure in my nerves, strong enough to make me stumble in surprise.
I grabbed the spider with my other hand and pulled, wrenching it free—felt that spark too, it was like a low-voltage shock, just above the threshold for pain—and flung it to the ground. I stomped on it, but even as I was enjoying that fleeting satisfaction, I saw another two spiders racing toward me along the cargo containers.
The surviving spiders were still following Sigrah’s earlier command to trap and destroy. And now the goddamned murder machines had found me.
I ducked my head and ran. The pain in my hip was growing worse with every step, shooting down my leg and up my back, but I didn’t dare stop. Another spider jumped for me, landed on my back. I grabbed it but couldn’t wrench it free.
Those sparks of nerve pain returned as the spider burrowed itself into my shoulder joint, and at the same moment I noticed flashes of light across my left eye—the artificial one—and fuck, fuck, fuck, that little fucker wasn’t just clinging to me to blow me up, it was fucking with my prosthetics, it was hacking me like I was an enemy machine.
I spun around and slammed my shoulder into the nearest shipping container, hard enough to knock the spider loose. I stomped on it just before I stumbled past the end of the row. I turned to my left and sprinted toward the exterior wall of the cargo warehouse, turned again.
We had left the airlock wide open. Careless for a crime scene, but really quite helpful for me. I veered inside and reached to pull the interior hatch closed. Another spider leapt for me, landed on my right hand, the one its friend had punctured hours ago. It ran up my arm and around my shoulder. The door closed with a heavy clunk, and I spun the wheel to engage the manual lock before grabbing the spider.
“Get the fuck off me!” I smashed it to the ground and stomped on it, stomping again and again and again, as the airlock door closed. “Fuck fuck fuck!”
I only stopped when it was a wreck of metal pieces and smashed circuits, utterly flattened beneath my boots.
Another one skittered over the outside of the interior window, then another, their blink-fast motions obscuring my view.
I dropped my pack to the floor and tore it open to get the emergency suit. I had to turn the suit a few times to locate all the limbs; my hands were shaking. I couldn’t see the spiders outside the airlock anymore. They would be climbing to the control panel, they were going to be trying to get in—could they get in? Was their programming that smart? Maybe. Probably. I had to assume they could
