The Catalyst

-Chapter 51-


I awoke looking at Sandra. I couldn’t even recall passing out, or being taken down dirtside. The familiar tug of real gravity felt good on my bones—most of them. Some were irritated, having been broken in several places. I groaned, and Sandra smiled.
She looked hot to me, even with one arm missing. I realized with a feeling of disconnection that she really was smiling. It had to be the microbes and nanites working on her injuries. Most people aren’t happy after they have a limb ripped off and nearly die. What I wasn’t sure of is how much those tiny creatures had affected her mind as well as her body.
“You’re awake,” she said.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Back home on Andros Island. This is the hospital inside Fort Pierre. Don’t you recognize it?”
“Tell me I fell in the shower and the aliens were all a bad dream.”
Sandra shook her head. “I wish they were. We won at least—you do remember that, don’t you?”
“Yes. Tell me about my crew, did everyone make it?”
She shook her head. “Welter got out. Sloan got out.”
“Sloan always gets out,” I commented. “What about Jasmine?” I asked.
Her eyes half-closed and pursed her lips into a tight, pissed expression.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I mean Major Sarin.”
“She made it, but she was banged up a bit. She says Marvin carried her off the ship as it went down into the atmosphere. And Kwon has some new scars, but he’s still a marine.”
“That’s great news,” I said.
“Gorski can’t be found,” she continued, frowning. “I think he manned his gun until the end.”
“Gorski didn’t make it?” I asked, shaking my head. “He was a good man. I’ll name a ship or a base after him.”
“Really, we didn’t lose too many considering the cruiser went down,” Sandra said. “Most of the unit was out jumping on Macro ships in those new suits of yours.”
“How about you?” I asked.
Sandra lifted her stump of an arm for me to examine. I could see a dangling tendon and mercury-like metal.
“I haven’t had time to reattach it yet,” she said.
“Do you still have it?”
“Yeah, it’s on ice.”
I reflected to myself that Sandra had become one tough girl. She hardly seemed to be flustered by a lost arm. Maybe it was all the nanites and the microbes. Or maybe it was a side-effect of having died multiple times already.
“Won’t it rot or something?” I asked. “Go get it reattached.”
“I plan to take it into one of the medical rooms when you recover,” she said.
“Just do it now,” I told her. “I’m fine.”
“Liar,” she said.
She kissed me and I waved her away with the hand that still worked. She left and I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth in pain. They had an I. V. hooked up to my good arm, but it didn’t seem to be doing any good.
“Knock, knock!” said a gruff voice at the door.
I turned and winced. I thought maybe I had a cracked vertebra in my neck. It really hurt. I hoped the nanites were up to the repair job they obviously had to do on me.
Crow smiled hugely as he walked in. I wondered if he would try to suffocate me with my pillow.
“There you are, mate!” he called loudly. “About time you rejoined the party.”
Crow looked meaty as usual. He had more white hair than the last time I’d seen him. His blue eyes glowed at me around his hawk-nose. He grinned and showed me teeth that were big, white and square.
“Glad to be back,” I said. “Are there any more Macros in sight?”
Crow shook his head. “My ships finished the last of them.”
I stared at him for a minute. We had a long and rocky history. I was still somewhat angry he had not joined the fight against the Macros earlier. I had kept hoping he would engage, so I could hit them when they were focused on Star Force ships. But he had waited until my cruiser went down.
I told myself he hadn’t struck because he had known he would have lost every ship he had against four Macro cruisers. Still, it somehow seemed wrong to me he would allow them to carpet bomb Europe. We were supposed to stop the enemy from killing civilians, or die trying. What else were we doing in these uniforms?
I knew Crow, however, and understood him. He wasn’t the type to sacrifice for others. He would help, but he wouldn’t die for a lost cause. I supposed a man had to work with the allies he had, sometimes.
I smiled at last and reached for his hand with my good one. “Thanks for joining the fight when you did,” I said, taking the high road.
He shook my hand, but looked slightly troubled. At last, he nodded. “I didn’t know it was you, Kyle. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We didn’t give anything away in our Macro disguise. Hell, even the Macros bought it.”
Crow grinned then with his big teeth showing. “I just had to come see the hero,” he said. “Oh, and there’s one more visitor waiting in the hall. I would have kicked him out, but Sandra vouched for him.”
“Yeah?”
Crow walked to the door and waved Marvin in. The robot didn’t look too good. His propulsion dish was stuttering. His nanite arms were twitching, and he could barely hold onto his dish.
“This is the weirdest pet robot you’ve ever dragged home, Riggs,” Crow said, eyeing Marvin in disdain. “You sure you know what you’re doing, mate?”
I looked Marvin over. One of his cameras was dead and dragged behind him on the floor. A second camera moved normally, but the lens was cracked and I doubted he could see much.
“No,” I told Crow. “I rarely know what I’m doing.”
Crow left after giving me a lengthy report concerning our defenses. He was building masses of mines now, suspiciously similar in design to the ones I’d used on the Macros. He would deploy them at both the rings place float masses of them in orbit over Venus. Hopefully, the next Macro expedition would be wiped out.
“Set up the biggest minefield at Venus,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because last time they assembled a large fleet, it came in piece by piece from that direction. I think that’s where their main strength lies.”
He agreed, and went off to prepare. We’d won a battle, but the second war with the Macros had just begun. I only wished I knew if we were Rome or Carthage in this series of conflicts. I thought we seemed a lot more like Carthage than Rome, but I hoped not, because things hadn’t turned out so well for them.
Marvin wanted his promised parts, naturally. I decided it was time to have a long overdue conversation with him.
“What happened to med-tech Ning, Marvin?” I asked.
“I do not know,” he said.
“Her nametag was found in microbial soup in Sandra’s medical pod. You said you needed more protein to finish her repairs. Did you use Ning for that purpose?”
Both Marvin’s functional eyes were on me, and the third one with the cracked lens joined them. “Jolly Rodger was destroyed. Ning may have been destroyed with it.”
Was that evasion, I wondered, or just Marvin’s usual literal-mindedness? It did seem like he was still answering my first question while avoiding my second. “So, I’m going to assume you did use her proteins to repair Sandra,” I said. “That is an unacceptable practice—”
“She asked you to do this, didn’t she?” Marvin asked.
“She? You mean Sandra?”
“Yes.”
I looked at him, startled. Was that anger I sensed in him? I didn’t think he was capable of that emotion.
“Asked me to do what?” I asked.
“To cheat. To change the parameters of our arrangement at the final moment.”
“No, she didn’t ask for that,” I said. “She doesn’t even know about our arrangement.”
One of the cameras tilted closer. “She wants to disassemble me, you know.”
I shook my head bemusedly. What was I supposed to do with Marvin? He could be telling the truth. Ning might have easily been lost in the mad scramble to evacuate Jolly Rodger. The nametag could be easily explained as well. Perhaps Ning was working on Sandra when the ship was hit. Maybe she was injured and fell into the medical pod, to be consumed by the microbes.
“Let’s talk about Sandra then,” I said. “She’s not like everyone else who went through the microbial baths. She is stronger, faster, and has gained better senses. Why is that?”
“Superior base-materials, longer period of exposure, and superior workmanship.”
“Superior base-materials—meaning Ning.”
“The closer the match and the fresher the base-materials—” he began.
“Yeah, I got it,” I said. “I don’t understand what you mean about superior workmanship, however.”
“Microbial generations are very short. They mutate and learn at a highly accelerated rate. Those that worked on her had already worked on two other humans.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. “The dirty motor oil stuff. Those microbes were experts after having worked on Kwon and Carlson? You think they learned that fast?”
“Yes.”
“But I still don’t know why she came out so differently than the others.”
“I would surmise they performed experiments, taking their own initiative.”
I looked at him harshly. “I would find that more likely if they were ordered to do so,” I said.
Marvin’s cameras studied me, but made no comment. “Is this interview at an end?” he asked finally.
“I suppose it is.”
“Have you found my actions and responses satisfactory?”
I knew he was asking for me to uphold my part of the bargain, but I wanted to know more while I had him in a compliant mood.
“Did you kill Ning, Marvin?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “But I might have put her body into the medical pod to be repaired. And she might have been used by the microbials as raw materials. Accidentally.”
“You might have?”
“Yes—if such an admission does not negatively influence your decision to fulfill your commitments.”
I snorted and shook my head, staring at him. Marvin quietly awaited my decision. I wasn’t completely sure what had happened between Ning, Marvin and Sandra. If Marvin’s story was the truth, it explained a lot. I tended to believe he had taken unsavory action, but that he was not a murderer. He was more of a mad scientist.
In the end, I decided to help him. I guess after he had saved the lives of several of my crewmembers, it hard to say ‘no’. A promise was a promise. Even if it was made to a robot…at least, that was the way I saw it.
“Okay Marvin,” I said. “I promised. We’ll build you some new parts as soon as I heal up. But you can’t continue to experiment upon humans the way you do machines.”
“Agreed,” he said. “How will we proceed?”
“Come back in three days,” I told him. “I need to recuperate.”
The days passed quickly, and before I knew it I was working out with barrels of nanites at the base where we still kept most of our factories. I set Marvin’s brainbox up in the heart of a Nano ship that looked eerily like Alamo. As I built his new body, I had to wonder if I was making some kind of far-reaching error. I hoped not.
I hooked up the manipulator arm and gave him a single engine. There was no repair unit onboard—no factory he could use to duplicate his mind or other parts. There was no armament, either. He had power, sensors, an engine and an arm. That was it.
How much trouble could he get into with that?

The End