I Am Automaton 2: Kafka Rising Read online

  “It should be me,” said Peter.

  “Awaiting your order,” said the communications officer.

  Peter reached over the man’s shoulder and pressed the button himself. The video screen showed a representation of the signal uploading to the satellite and then disseminating over the globe. The communications officer looked awkwardly at Betancourt, who shrugged.

  It was done.

  Peter looked at the map of the globe up on the screen and hoped that wherever Carl was, this transmission gave him peace. That was why Peter wanted to press the button himself…

  …he wanted to give his brother peace.

  Chapter 17

  One Week Later

  Fundraising Benefit

  Chateau Chevalier, Washington DC

  23:00 HRS

  “Be ready,” said General Ramses biting into a mini quiche. He swallowed it, savoring the sounds coming from the jazz band. “We go online in twenty-four hours. We’ll need the encryptions for the data streams.”

  “Don’t you worry,” said Jon Wolff, Assistant Director of the NSA. “Everything’s in place. Once congress passed the Second Patriot Act, our cryptographers went into overdrive. We have some beautiful algorithms for you, new Suite A stuff, 920-bit elliptic curve.”

  “I have no idea what you just said,” admitted Ramses looking around the room dimly lit by opulent crystal chandeliers, “but it sounds good to me. There’s some concern that this data can be intercepted via satellite.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard about the extra-terrestrial concern,” smirked Wolff.

  “Yes, well, let’s just say that the crazy ramblings of a certain rogue operative before his death made an impression on some of the brass.”

  “Aren’t you the brass, General?”

  “Just tell me that this data cannot be cracked,” demanded Ramses impatiently.

  “Maybe not by the Predator or ET, but perhaps by the Romulans.”

  “Great,” huffed Ramses, “I’m talking national security and he’s referencing old movies.”

  “Relax, General. It should be secure.”

  “Should be?”

  “It will be. Besides, no one knows we are using this technology.”

  “Except for OIL,” corrected Ramses.

  “I understand that your man took care of that, and at great personal cost,” said Wolff.

  “Yes, he did. But we don’t know if anyone else knows.”

  “Our cypher is near impossible to crack, even by space aliens.”

  “That’s real reassuring, Jon. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to drop the bomb on Japan.”

  Jon shook his head at the crude reference to a bowel movement. Ramses excused himself and made his way across the crowded room of politicians, governmental officials, and socialites to the staircase.

  He climbed the staircase to the second floor and walked down a long hallway. He passed a couple talking rather intimately in the hallway next to a painting of the French countryside. He found the men’s room door on the right.

  He opened the door and entered. He passed an attendant rearranging his towels, perfumes, and mints, and took the closest stall. He put down the paper guard on the toilet seat, pulled his pants down, and plopped himself down on the bowl in the nick of time.

  He thought he heard the attendant lock the door. “Excuse me. There’s someone in here.”

  A head popped up over the side of the stall, black as an oil slick with four red eyes. It was the attendant. When he smiled, he revealed pearly white fangs.

  “YOU!” said Ramses, aghast.

  Kafka flipped over the side of the stall and landed in front of Ramses, who tried to stand but was slammed back down on the bowl.

  “Please, General, don’t stand up on account of me.”

  “You’re supposed to be dead! Help! Help!”

  Kafka rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t waste your breath, General. I’ve taken the liberty of putting a ‘do not disturb’ sign on the door and posting a drone in a custodian’s outfit outside so our meeting isn’t…interrupted.”

  “How can you be here?”

  “Well, I have a saying…well, it’s actually more of a credo for me: what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

  “The chip. What about the chip?”

  Kafka reached into his tuxedo breast pocket with a white-gloved hand and pulled out a small, thin, square chip with dried blood crusted around it. He tossed it into Ramses’ naked lap. Ramses bobbled it a bit and took a look at it. “How?”

  Kafka pulled back his greasy hair and turned his head to reveal a hole in his skull. “I dug it out myself with my finger. Not a very pleasant thing to do, but absolutely necessary under the circumstances.”

  “If you kill me, you won’t make it out of here alive.”

  Kafka looked genuinely amused. “I don’t want to kill you, General.”

  “Then what do you want?” snapped Ramses.

  “I want you to live. I want you to launch the RGT program, and I want it to flourish.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” said Ramses contemptuously, “you and your alien overlords.”

  “If you weren’t so concerned about it, why did I just see you chatting it up with the Assistant Director of the NSA? Let me guess…they’re using KG-250 with a TCP/IP accelerator, Suite A algorithms…Am I getting warm?”

  “Even if you could break the encryption,” Ramses said, “what would you possibly do with data on millions of people’s memories and experiences?”

  Kafka shrugged. “Me? Personally, nothing. But my friends from outer space, well, they would just eat that data up.”

  “Why? For what purpose would they use the data?”

  “That’s for me to know and earth to find out, and it will soon enough,” Kafka teased with a hint of menace.

  “Why are you telling me all of this?”

  “Because I know that you know that no one believes in this UFO theory of yours, and it’s going to eat you alive to know that you have to go ahead with the RGT Program constantly wondering if I’m really crazy.”

  “Oh, I think we’ve established the answer to that question,” answered Ramses.

  “Maybe so, but you’ll always wonder.”

  “So that’s my punishment? To live in fear and guilt?”

  “No,” answered Kafka, “your punishment is coming. When it arrives, you’ll wish I killed you with my bare hands in this bathroom.”

  “What about your brother?” Ramses asked, trying to deflect the attention off of him.

  “Peter? He’ll get his, too. Everyone will.”

  “Well if that’s the case, then why don’t you get out of here so I can finish my shit in peace?”

  “Certainly, General. But first, a memento of our time here together.” Kafka opened his mouth to reveal fangs, and he bit into Ramses before he could react, sinking his fangs into his shoulder. Ramses struggled on the bowl, attempting to pry Kafka from him.

  Finally, Kafka pulled away. “One of my new tricks. Now I will always be with you, General. I will see what you see. I will haunt your dreams. We are now inexorably connected.”

  Ramses clutched his shoulder, “Get out! GET-OUT!”

  When he looked up, Kafka was gone. He pulled up his pants and flushed the toilet. He burst out of the stall and threw the door to the outside hallway open. He peered down the hallway, but it was empty.

  He went back into the bathroom and took off his jacket, throwing it on the sink platform and knocking over the attendant’s tip bowl. He unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, placing it on top of his jacket.

  He turned on the faucet for the hot water full blast and let it run into the sink. When the water was hot, he scooped some up in his right hand and washed the bite on his left shoulder. He grabbed some paper towels and dabbed at the two holes until the blood began to coagulate.

  Then he turned off the faucet. The hot water had steamed the mirror above the sink. He was startled at the sight of a four-eyed smiling face drawn on the mirror a
t face level, overlapping his. The crude features smeared as the moisture on the mirror ran, creating an unnerving effect.

  He threw the paper towels out and put his shirt and jacket back on hastily. He spilled out into the hallway and strode back to the staircase. He looked at the room and all of its occupants, social butterflies bouncing from clique to clique in almost random patterns.

  He descended the stairs with heavy feet, holding onto the bannister, looking at Jon Wolff talking to one of the young female socialites, the one with the reality show…flirting was more like it. He couldn’t blame Jon, given her reputation.

  On his way down the stairs, he bumped shoulders with a passerby. He looked up to excuse himself and caught a glimpse of the man he bumped. An odd chill ran down his spine…

  …he could’ve sworn the man bore an uncanny resemblance to him.

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  BARU SHEEN

  Conor Stasik shut down the computer systems on his fighter and adjusted his suit for the atmosphere.

  “Get to as many of them as you can, Stasik,” Commander Chalmers instructed him over the comm line. “But only if you can. No point making things worse. We’ll send ships to help within the hour. Just stay wired and wait to hear from us.”

  “Yes, sir,” Conor said. He couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t try getting into the compound, though, regardless of the risk.

  The prospect of danger didn’t bother him. The fleet had made it perfectly clear to everyone aboard their warship, the Doorway, that their lives were forfeit the moment they enlisted. It was just the way of things out in deep space. Ever since humans encountered extraterrestrials and war had broken out with species from beyond their solar system, none of the astronauts expected to return home in one piece. So, as far as Conor was concerned, he was already on borrowed time, and dying in an attempt to rescue his captive brothers and sisters from the Doorway was just as good as dying anywhere else in the far reaches of the Milky Way. Maybe better.

  It wasn’t all death wishes and resigned recklessness for him, though. He loved his shipmates. A handful of them especially. Life at sea (the navy still referred to the vacuum as water, a habit that refused to die), along with the intense training regimen on the Doorway, had forged a bond between Conor and a few of his crewmates greater than he’d ever felt with his real family. If he could find a way to break even one of them out of captivity, his death would be worth it.

  Exhaling deeply, he finished calibrating the gravity equalizers on his boots and headed for the exit hatch at the back of his vessel.

  “Doorway, this is Ensign Stasik. I’m ready to scout the perimeter of the compound on your mark,” he said into his comm link.

  There was a long pause while the transmission reached from the planet’s rocky surface to the other side of its second moon, where the Doorway hid beyond the range of Kalak scanners. Or so they hoped.

  “Proceed, Ensign Stasik.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He pushed a button on the control panel beside the hatch and it gasped open.

  The wind drove him back into the ship.

  Damn.

  Conor grimaced. It was going to be a long walk.

  Especially in this god-awful place.

  Baru Sheen was a miserable planet inside and out. He’d known about the strong winds and dust swirls that made visibility difficult a meter or two above the surface, but he hadn’t been prepared for the iron in the air. The smell was so strong that it soaked through his suit and made the oxygen in his glass-domed helmet taste like blood.

  “Cutting communications, Doorway. I’ll report back once I’m inside.”

  “Understood,” the commanding officer responded. Conor couldn’t tell who the C.O. was over the howling wind, but it couldn’t have been Chalmers because there was no warning or objection to his plan of entering the compound. He supposed that was one upside to radio silence. There weren’t many others.

  But as nice as it would have been to stay wired all the way to the base, it wasn’t worth the risk. If he tried connecting close to the compound, the Kalak sensors would pick up on his comm link almost immediately. And it wouldn’t do him much good to be in contact with the ship, anyway. The fleet was already assembling whatever backup they could spare for a rescue operation. There was no point calling for help. The Doorway hadn’t even been able to get Conor’s small fighter off planet.

  Could be worse.

  He could have been inside the facility already with the rest of the humans. After all, he’d been a part of the same mission team that had been overrun. By pure luck, he’d narrowly avoided capture. If he’d been any closer to the front of the line or even a ship or two farther back, he would have been taken along with the rest of his team.

  Now, though, it appeared his luck had run out. The higher-ups in the fleet had decided it was too risky for him to try slipping past the Kalak surface-to-air defense cannons, and they were probably right. He wouldn’t have made it ten kilometers from the base before his ship was blown to hell, and then the Kalak would have a lock on the Doorway’s position, too.

  So, Conor was alone. The entirety of the rescue party for the unfortunate captives, and an inexperienced one at that. He wasn’t even close to being out of the woods yet.

  Just before he severed communications, Commander Chalmers cut in. “Good luck, Stasik. We’ll get you out of there as soon as we can.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The line clicked and, this time, Conor was truly cut off from humanity. Back in the howling wind with a strange, purple and blue sky above, and the canyons rolling away from the acidic sea. Back in Hell, in other words.

  Back on Baru Sheen.

  Baru Sheen.

  The planet’s name came from the Kalak words for ‘wasteland’. It had been assigned other monikers before the Kalak claimed it (not that anyone was challenging them), but that was long before humans knew anything about them or the inhospitable world beyond Earth’s solar system.

  And it was inhospitable. Not even the monstrous Kalak were capable of surviving the harsh winds and dry air of the planet’s surface. They’d had to employ an army of mechs to construct their scattered military research facilities across Baru Sheen while they’d monitored progress from one of its moons. Therefore, there was little chance Conor would come in contact with any living creature before he reached the Kalak compound. He supposed he could at least take comfort in that. No ambushes, guns for hire, or local abominations to slow him down. The difficulty would be finding the facility at all with such choking darkness around him. It would be easier to walk off a cliff to his death outside of the canyons, especially since the gravitational pull on Baru Sheen was stronger than elsewhere in the galaxy, even with the equalizers in his suit. And in the high velocity wind, one of the sharp canyon rocks was liable to tear right through his suit. In fact, there were plenty of ways to die on Baru Sheen. Plenty of imaginative deaths he could suffer before even the first wave of help from the Doorway arrived.

  But for all those horrible possibilities, his captive shipmates were surely living the worst of them, and that gave him urgency if not courage.

  Careful to synchronize his steps with the new weight of the boots, Conor slowly made his way down the ramp to the rocky ground, where he paused to consult the holographic map of the compound that had been programmed into his suit. It wasn’t much, but it gave him some ideas.

  “Beginning rescue mission,” he said into his suit’s recorder.

  Linked to the ship or not, he was still required to detail his mission in case something happened to him. At least until the fighting began or stealth was required. If the Doorway didn’t hear from him in the next few hours, they would establish an emergency connection with his suit to locate him and extract the recorded data…provided that his suit hadn’t been completely destroyed. It seemed like a stupid requirement to Conor, especially now, on this particular mission.
If he died, his suit would more than likely be destroyed beyond repair, and if he survived, there wouldn’t be any need to document his experience outside of the idle curiosity of military historians and the media. Unless, of course, there was an inquiry into his actions by the Crown, but that rarely happened during the war, and even when it did, it was rarely considered a reliable account.

  Still, with it being the first mission of his career, he was committed to protocol. For now.

  “I landed just over two kilometers south of the Kalak facility. Approaching the main canyon now.”

  Even within the protection of his domed helmet, his voice was barely audible over the wind.

  Who gives a shit?

  The comm officers could worry about isolating his vocals later if they needed to.

  If he’d had the time or resources to devise a better approach than creeping through the canyon to the hangar entrance, he might not have felt so anxious about the lack of visibility on the snaking, isolated paths the acid ocean had carved long before the Kalak had dammed the sea. But since his mission was a full blown emergency, he had no other options. The Kalak facility was part of a peninsula overlooking a steep drop into a sea of Candric Acid: a unique liquid found only in the Corona System that could burn through his suit, skin, and bones in a matter of seconds. The only true alternative was an aerial drop onto the roof of the facility or into one of the waste outlets that emptied by the sea, but the Kalak had already demonstrated how their defense turrets could eliminate human aircraft, and it would be a long time before the Doorway was capable of sending one in, anyway.

  In other words, Conor was shit out of luck. His first mission was a suicide mission.

  Could be worse, he thought again.

  At least now that he was closer to the base, he could see where he was going.

  He walked down the canyon for a while, careful to stay in the shadows of the watchtower lights, although they didn’t seem to be manned as far as he could tell. That was strange, especially since surface interference on Baru Sheen made it difficult to pick up heat signatures below ten meters.