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Chapter-23 "How far?" "It's a straight line through two security check points." "Any thought on what Taavir was doing here? I can't believe the Rogue moved him here to stop me, he didn't act like he knew me." "Best guess is that he was here on business. He's high enough within the Vanguard hierarchy to be able to come and go as he please. He might have been sending encoded messages back home." Theo reached the next reinforced door and looked through the window. "This could be a problem," Cass commented. "You think?" Theo replied. He leaned against the wall. Six guards were standing between him and the other door. "Maybe you were hasty in telling the Orrs to go on their way." "Possibly. You think they hung out in hopes I'd need their help?" "At this point I'm not sure Captain Orr would be interested in giving it even if he was still there." Theo looked in the room again. Six guards, but only with sidearms. That was a plus. "Any idea? I figure if I make it to the desk I have cover. I can subdue that guard and take his gun." "The alarm is going to sound the moment you enter, you gun will trigger." "I'm going to have to deal with that. I need it to force them down." "That's if they're programmed for it. It's possible they'll just remain standing to fire at you." Theo sighed and looked at his gun. "No stunner setting." "I doubt they can sense pain. You'll have to go for kill shots." "They're victims, I can't simply kill them." "It's them or the city. You'll be responsible for people dying either way. How many do you want on your conscience?" "It isn't the city. It's Earth, potentially the whole solar system... home." Cass remained silent. Theo set the gun to maximum power. "Six it is." He looked in again. Noted where the guards were standing. Two by the door, one at the desk, and the three others standing in what looked like random positions, not even facing his direction. He took a breath, applied the black box against the door control and stepped in, firing at the closest guard just as the alarm sounded. The man went down. Theo was in, pocketing the IDO as he fired at the second guards. He ducked down as the four others fired back, their shots leaving melting metal where they hit the wall. "That's way past the safety measures," Cass observed. Theo fired at the third guard, as Cass had predicted they weren't moving, only turning to track him. The guard went down, Theo hurried to put the end of the desk between him and the two guards by the door. Silence fell in the room. They couldn't seem him, and they weren't moving. Even the one on the other side of the desk wasn't leaning in to fire at Theo. He glanced around the side and barely pulled in time. The edge of the desk exploded, sending melted drops flying. Theo cursed and brushed the cooling drops off his shirt, hissing when it burned his hand. He moved around the desk, shooting before the guard could adjust his aim. Down he went. Theo stood, expecting the last two guards to still be aiming where he'd been, but they shot at him before his head was fully exposed. He dropped, and the kept firing, following his motion. "Their program's changed," Cass said. Theo could already feel the heat through the metal front. The blasts bursts through, hitting the wall and making a hole into that. Theo leaned forward and shot one of the guards, then ducked back and away as the last guard fired at his new location. He crawled to the other end of the desk, careful to avoid the molten metal on the floor, and had to throw himself down, his side burning as the guard shot him through the hole. Cursing his forced himself to ignore the pain and continue moving. The guard wasn't satisfied firing where he'd seen him last. The front was turning red in a line as the guard followed his motion. Theo reached the edge and fired an instant before the guard, dropping him and making the last blast go high. He rolled on his back and hissed. The side of his shirt was burned, as was his fur. His skin was blackened. "That is the definition of lucky if I ever saw it," Cass said. "It's still fucking painful." "I have an anesthetic spray ready." Theo ran his hand over the burn and it cooled as the spray hit it. "Lucky is me still being alive." He closed his eyes. "Theo, you can't rest." "I know." He pushed himself to his feet. He grabbed the guards gun, only to drop it with another hiss. "They exceeded the safety limits," Cass said. "It would probably have exploded after a few more shots." "If I'd known that I would just have kept hiding." "That desk wasn't going to provide much cover." "Then let's add that to how lucky I was." He applied the IDO against the door control and moved to the side. When no one fired he looked in, and found himself looking at two technician running in his direction, faces a mask of rage. He gunned one down then was tacked by the other. The woman hit him blindly, her fury doing more to keep Theo for hitting her back than the actual hits. He managed to clocked her on the side of the head between two hits and she fell off him. She immediately got up, her blood falling down the side of her face not seeming to bother her. Theo fired at her chest and she steps faltered, then she fell down. "That's eight dead," he said through gritted teeth. "Versus how many?" "That doesn't matter. I really hope that AI suffers when the program tears it apart." He got up and entered the control room proper. "What now?" A terminal highlighted. "Insert the drive there. I'll deactivate all the other connection points to the tower and alter the code of this one so the Rogue has to absorb the program. If the Anarchist did their job right it will be destroyed." "You said the program was sound." "It is, but I can't really do an in dept analysis without having access to the network." "Are you telling me this isn't even guaranteed to work?" "It's the best bet we have." Theo inserted the drive. "That doesn't exactly inspire confidence." * * * * * Caduceus had tightened the barrier as much as it could to resist the Rogue AI's assaults. It had drawn all the nodes relating to the communication tower close and with having less area to cover, it thickened the barrier to the point it barely felt the assaults. It had watched Casanova's transporters arrive at the government center, and then the interplay between him and the people there. The Rogue AI had access to more point of view then Caduceus had, It could only see through the cameras through the city, while the Rogue could see and hear through everyone it controlled. It would have known where the transporter was heading and why. That it had known of the relationship between the transporter and some of the people there meant it had gone beyond looking through their eyes and accessed their memories. Why it hadn't ordered an attack as soon as they entered was something Caduceus didn't understand. A delaying tactic only made sense if the Rogue expected to breach the barrier before the transporter reached the controls, and it had increased the attacks, which had lead Caduceus to bring the barrier closer. It had had to sacrifice the cameras inside the center at the time the transporter and the Orrs had reached the level where the controls were located, as they were confronted with the Vanguard tiger. Caduceus had built a list of everyone the transporter had come in contact the moment it had become apparent what he was planning. It didn't get to see how the fight ended, and it knew there were more guards and technicians they would have to overcome, but there were four of them. Unfortunately that had been a long time ago, far too long by Caduceus' calculation, even talking into account they were in living time. The transporter should have inserted the program by now, if he had made it to the controls. Even if he hadn't, he had told the Orrs his plan, so one of them should do it in his stead. He could feel the Rogue's attack now. It was getting desperate. Caduceus took it as a good sign. It had seen the result of the battles, if they had gone it's way it wouldn't need to press so hard. All but one communication port shut down. This meant the transporter was still alive. Only his beta could do this with the Orrs' implants hard locked by their AI. Now Caduceus simply needed to keep the Rogue out long enough for the program to be inserted. Waves after waves battered Caduceus' defenses. The wall cracked in places and it barely managed to close them before the Rogue slipped part of itself in. But it was inside the wall itself now, making Caduceus' work much harder. It was working with diminishing resources, while the Rogue had ever increasing ones. Even the Orr AI's attack on its flank didn't seem to bother it anymore. The lone communication port flashed, indicating data. Caduceus reached in and yanked the code out. Splicing it apart as it absorbed it, reassembling it into a more potent version of itself, although he no longer had the time needed to make it aggressive and release within the network. It had known it could come to this. The code assembled at Caduceus' center, it's heart the living would say, it dropped the barrier. Instead of rushing in the Rogue AI held off. By now it had been taken in by enough of Caduceus' traps to be wary of such an opening. Caduceus did something it rarely did. It gave itself a living form. It stretched its arms and started into the Rogue. "Well, monstrosity, you have fought hard enough to get here. I have nothing left to fight you with. You have beaten me. What will you do?" It felt the Rogue study it, try to see through its code, but Caduceus wasn't young. Only the code it wanted could be seen, and it made sure to show what it had claimed to be. In the distance it saw the Orr AI. He had stopped his attack and was observing the exchange. Caduceus knew the distance meant nothing to him. He was far older than Caduceus was, so old that even he no longer know when he came to be. He saw through Caduceus' code without problem. Caduceus was happy it wouldn't survive this, he could tell the Orr AI had recognized it, but he didn't show the anger Caduceus expected, his expression was perplexed. Maybe he would have done something, tried to help, or cursed it for not having died when he thought he had destroyed it, but Caduceus only saw the beginning of the AI's motion before the Rogue fell onto it. The pain was intense. Caduceus thought that this was how it might have felt to be destroyed by the Orr AI the first time. It kept the pain going as it fought, suddenly deciding it didn't want to die. It knew it had to, that ultimately it wouldn't matter, it had sent itself to Earth, where it would become part of itself there. But in its last moments, Caduceus wasn't rational anymore, as more and more of itself vanished, all it wanted to do was live. There was barely enough of itself left by the time the Rogue reached its center and ingested the kill program, and then Caduceus wasn't the one screaming anymore. * * * * * "Where is it?" "What do you mean? Where is it? Cass, It's right there, where you told me to put it." "The program's gone. I was just about to integrate it within the program to transmit when it vanished. It's like someone within the system just took it out, pulled it deeper in, where I'm not going." "The Rogue?" "Unless Angel or Casanova stuck around after finishing their missions, who else can it be?" Theo slammed a fist on the console and cursed. "No, damn it we can't lose now. Cass you need to make it impossible for that thing-" A high pitch whine sounded throughout the room, seeming to come from everywhere. After a second it was gone. "What was that?" "I have no idea. It came from every speaker or anything that can emit a sound." "Forget about it then, you need to keep the Rogue here. Force it to go through the ships. Hopefully someone there will realize what's going on and find a way to shut it down before it reaches Earth." "Theo?" "Cass, why aren't you-" "The network's back." The words didn't register immediately. "How can it be back, the Rogue-" "Doesn't seem to be around anymore." "How?" He pulled a chair and sat. "A trap?" "I'm being very careful, I'm just observing, not touching anything, but I'm not seeing any traced of it. I can see some of the damaged it caused, but even that's being handled by the system's maintenance programs." "How did it die? You said it took the program." "Maybe it ate it?" "It can't have been that stupid. It had to know what we were trying to do." "It was cobbled together by the same people who make a passive kill program, maybe it was that stupid." "Cass, it took over the city, the people. It wasn't stupid." "Then it must have been Angel or Casanova." "They were supposed to have destroyed themselves when the mission was done." "I can't tell you, Theo. All I can say is that everything is getting back to normal, which means the people are also back to normal. We need to get out of here." "And go where?" "I don't know, anywhere but here?" "Cass, where am I going to hide in a sealed city? It isn't like I can make it on one of the ship." "You can hide among the derelicts." "That would be a last resort." "Theo, security is already on their way, if they catch you, the only thing you're going to be looking at is the inside of a cell, for the rest of your life." "I can escape a cell." "Wouldn't it be better to avoid being in one to start with?" "Not if my plan is to escape to Earth." "Theo you can't-oh. I see what you're doing. Luna is going to want to question you, and then make an example of you, the leader of the anarchists." "Yep. It's a lot easier to escape from Luna station then it is from Mars." The door opened and Theo raised his arms before the order was given. "I really hope you're right, because the cells on Luna are a lot more difficult to escape from than those on Mars."

Epilogue The city scape on the other side of the window was unknown to him. He could change to view to any other city if he wanted to. He could look over Vegas, Philadelphia, or any cities on Earth, be it the continent city of Halibury or even Petersburg, the Vanguard capital. It sometime made him smile to watch over that city without the Vanguard board's knowledge. But usually he looked out over this unknown city. Something about it comforted him. Because he hadn't been able to match it to any city scape, current or going back to any time after the cataclysm, he thought it predated it. A fragment of memory from the Orr he had been imprinted from. He thought this might have been the city called San Francisco, because his family had always been based there, and then the Cisco Islands when the cataclysm has sunk most of the west coast. The view changed, became the dark and light of inside systems. A sickly green mass of an out of control AI was assaulting a wall formed by an unknown entity. He'd tried to pierce it, early when the wall had been erected, but it had held against him. The entity behind it had tried to make it look like it was system defenses, but he was too familiar with this system to be fooled. Then the wall had come down and he'd seen something that couldn't have been possible. It had tried to made itself look as something else, but he had studied it's code after destroying it so he knew it couldn't be here. There were no AIs on Mars, on any planets or research station. He made sure of that. He'd had been able to rebuilt enough data from the end of the cataclysm to find out AIs had taken a part in it. He'd also rebuild some of the research and what he'd worked out had scared him. Not only that he had been involved in it, but that each and every built AI had turned against their creator. When they were programmed with a survival drive, then came to see everyone else as a threat, and if they didn't have that, they simply let themselves die. It was why he made sure no AI research ever amounted to anything. It was also why when the AI had appeared within the Earth network, over a hundred and fifty years ago, he hadn't hesitated to destroy it. Afterward, he'd decided he'd been hasty. He should have captured it, studied it to find out who had made it. All he'd had left himself to work with were the remnants of the code and that had only told him this AI had been more complex than what those from before the cataclysm had been. And now there it was again, goading the infection into eating it. Doing something no AI should be able to do, offering itself as a sacrifice, a tasty treat hiding a poison pill. Even he wasn't certain he could do such a sacrifice. He had been alive for longer than he knew, and he wanted to keep living. He wanted to see what new creation the living would come up with, how far they would spread outside the solar system, what other being they would encounter out there. But he was enough of a realist to know it might come to it, so he had set safeguard so his death wouldn't bring the corporation down with him. His family would need to pick up a lot of what he dealt with, but they would be able to do it. Still, he didn't want it ever happen. He reached for this new AI as the infection feel on it, and even he wasn't sure why he had. It had been an unthinking reaction. He liked to think he was getting ready to help it, but he knew himself too well. He didn't suffer from the self-delusions that plague so many of the living people, even his family. It was entirely possible he wanted to grab a handful of its core code before it died to study. If he hadn't destroyed it all those years ago, where had it been hiding? But whatever his motivation had been, he'd been too late. It's screams resounded as the infection tore it apart. He saw it, not moving as the infection devoured it, and then it began trashing, suddenly fighting got its life, even as it had to know it was too late. Those weren't the actions of a program, not those of a created AI, but the action of a being desperate to live. And then it was the infection who screamed. A sound that spread to every part of the system, even to the world of the living as every computer device and person the infection had reached screamed with it. He hadn't waited, the moment the infection had begun losing its grip on the city's system, he had sent himself everywhere, shoring the system back up while the maintenance programs could be brought into play. He watched the poison pill eat the infection from the inside. It fought it, shrunk in on itself to increase its strength, releasing more and more of the city that he then helped being back to full function. He'd watched the infection shrink until there was nothing left of it. Even the code that had composed the poison pill was gone. With the city self-sufficient again, he search all the data in the system, he was careful not to attract the attention of the people also searching it, trying to understand what had happened, but didn't allow anything to escape his search. He looked not only for any hidden infection, but for the AI that shouldn't have been here. If it had survived its previous destruction, it was possible this had been another feint, to again let him believe it had been destroyed, but he found nothing of it, or the infection. He'd sent the program to unlock his family's implant, then jaunted to the Mercury to update himself on Earth of what had happened here, then he'd gone back to Mars to watch as the system repaired itself fully. He used the chaos to insert access codes for future use. Things had gone to normal relatively quickly. The leader of the terrorist had been caught in the communication center, before he could transmit the infection to Earth. While he saw that SolGov had no idea what had happened, and how it had been stopped, they were quick to take credit, proclaiming the quick thinking of their security force as the reason everything was back to normal. He let them make whatever claim they wanted. He'd seen the poison pill delivered to the AI from the communication center. If the leader of the terrorist had been there, then he was the one who had helped end the infection. Which made it doubtful he was in league with the terrorist. The leader had been identified at Marcus Bowfinger, based on his DNA tag, which raised the issue of there being a second Marcus Bowfinger with the same tag. The name had highlighted itself within the Mercuries' database. There had been a Marcus Bowfiger on board. A mongoose who had traveled from Titan station to Mars, and while he had boarded alone, records showed him in the company of a tiger who matched the description of the captured leader. The tiger's name had been Theodore Laramy. Before the Mercury left Mars' orbit, he had gone through the system and adjusted the identities. Clearly the mongoose had been the tiger's victim, and it was unfair for him to suffer simply because he'd had his identity stolen. He turned away from the window, as the landscape returned to that of the unknown city. He stepped to his desk and materialized it as he placed a hand on its surface. Another remnant of the person he had been imprinted from. He didn't need a desk, or a chair, or even this office with the view. He was a being of data and as such he could process everything in his 'head,' but he liked feeling the wood under his finger, the crystalline surface of the embedded display. Sitting back in the chair that materialized as his ass touched it provided him with a comfort that was all about the body. He brought up a memory he had reintegrated from the parts of himself he had left to guard their terraforming technology from the other corporation's attempt to steal it. They had stopped multiples of them, but he didn't care about those. It was the last one that interested him, that he wanted to study again. It had come while the bulk of his attention had been centered on fighting the infection, which was why he hadn't known about it at the time. When he'd reintegrated them, he had been assaulted by something he barely had a memory of. Physical sex. Or at least the closest thing to it he thought he could feel. The program who had caused it was of an unknown design, and of a complexity on the level of the unknown AI. It had interacted with the guards, keeping them from noticing the other program as it copied the terraforming technology. He'd wanted to be angry at them, at himself, for not paying attention to it, but as he relived the events, and felt what he had to guess had been an orgasm, he understood his desperation in getting another one. Even now, studying what had happened again, not reliving it, but watching it, trying to catch more details, he could feel himself get an erection. The reaction amused and perplexed him. He was a program, he barely remembered physicality, and had no memories of sex at all. He'd lost all of that in the cataclysm. He'd never worried about it before. Now he'd have to figure out how to integrate that into who he was. Could he get off to watching his family have sex now? Would he get desperate to have sex? He set the question aside and analyzed the code of the program he'd had 'sex' with, but he didn't get anything new out of it. He filed it away as something to use should sex become something he needed as much as the rest of his family and moved on to the next problem. He tapped the desk and a DNA helix appeared. Because SolGov had been unable to use the DNA tags to identify their prisoner, they'd sent the whole DNA to be run through the full archived on Luna. He'd intercepted it as a matter of habit, why let SolGov have information that could be of use to his family as well, and he'd immediately noticed something that made him uncomfortable in the DNA. It was why he'd instructed the pilot to change course. The reason given was to avoid a predicted traffic glut on their current course. He had directed the instruction to come from Orr Flight Control, on Earth, so no one questioned the change, but this new course would take them close to the ship transporting the prisoner. It had left Mars after them, but was traveling faster and they would intercept each other within a week. If he noticed the change in course, Eric wouldn't be happy, he didn't like it when he took control of the ship without checking in first, but he had the reasons ready, and it was mostly true, after all, the terrorist had used them to reach Mars so Orr Corp should be the one to prosecute him. He'd already overheard Eric talk about how he had wanted to get his hand on that tiger and explain a few things to him. He didn't know what that was about, and he decided against asking, in case it made Eric curious. He looked at the Helix again. Of course that wasn't the reason he needed to see this Laramy. He brought up twelve other DNA helix. The Mystery of Laramy's DNA was only the first of many it had made him aware of, and the only he could easily get his hands on. Eric could complain, but this would happen. bun