Nanomech
R. David King
Copyright 2012 R. David King
Cover art copyright 2012 R. David King
CHAPTER 1
Aiben communed with molecule-sized robots inhabiting his body. They protected him from infection and strengthened his bones and muscles. They heightened his vision, hearing, and sense of taste and smell. They enabled him to control devices with the proper interfaces by thought alone. He could use them to penetrate hyperspace with his mind and communicate with others of his kind. For the moment, though, he had silenced the machines. It would be much easier for him to concentrate without them cluttering his thoughts.
Aiben stood at the bottom of a giant well walled with rusty iron grid-work. Countless levels of habitation, caked in filth, had been stacked ever higher with each new decade. The honeycombed girders of overgrown city sprang up all around him, constructed weeds that hedged up his view on all sides for hundreds of feet. Between the slats and gangways that thatched together the ground, the depths stretched down into subterranean infinity and left to his imagination what his enhanced senses couldn’t perceive.
Industrial emissions, cotton balls of cloudy soot, rode breezes stewed up by pressure and temperature differentials of the urban canyons. The oils of morning sunlight had already spilled over the tops of the enormous buildings like a muddy waterfall. Random flashes echoed off the reflective windows that tiled the buildings and lit up the metallic carapaces of spidery mechanoids, robotic creatures that climbed along the edifices and polished off the dirt and grime. Aiben’s eyes followed them, waiting.
A dirty gust of wind hammered thick poly-fiber pants against his legs. He pulled the collarless charcoal button-up shirt, and the sleeveless black leather vest, so popular on human worlds, tighter around his broad shoulders. His black hair, short in some places, long in others, tinted with a hint of bronze, looked ragged as it thrashed back and forth in the filtered gray light of the industrial world. He rubbed at a week’s worth of beard sprouting on his jaw. Despite what was going on inside him, his outward appearance gave the impression he was just a normal citizen of any Seven Guilds world.
“Are you going to stand there all morning and just stare at those buildings? I don’t pay you to daydream, you know.”
The smooth baritone of the man’s voice intertwined with the perfect rhythm of tools striking metal. The constant cadence would have been enough to stir up movement in most beings, but to Aiben, the tempo simply framed his thoughts as they raced to keep time.
“I’m just waiting for them to get off,” Aiben said. He kept watch on the enormous structures planted across from them in centuries of built-up sod. “And I’m not daydreaming either.”
The tools ceased their beat.
“What are you talking about? Those little mechs are always up there, you know that. They’re not coming down any time soon with all this smog around.”
A moist breath brushed the back of Aiben’s neck. Startled, he turned to lock gazes with a pair of electric cobalt eyes, one cradled by a scar that writhed each time it blinked. He scorned himself for allowing his friend, Ballis, to come so close without detection. He was distracted more than usual this morning.
“Not the spider-mechs,” Aiben shook his head, “I meant…”
“What?” Ballis eyed him.
“Nairom. He has to come back sometime. Today could be the day. Orbital ferry just docked. I’m waiting for the passengers to disembark.”
Ballis sighed and turned away. “Aiben, he’s gone. It was his choice. We’ve been over this so many times before and I have no desire to go over it again. Let it be.”
Aiben grit his teeth and steeled himself for a confrontation. “I don’t have to agree with his choice, though, do I?”
“I didn’t say you had to agree with it.” Ballis turned around. “But you have to live with it.”
“But what do you personally think?” Aiben asked. “Did he do the right thing? You’ve never said anything about it.”
“And it’ll stay that way,” Ballis said. “It’s not my place to say one way or the other. He made his decision and that’s all there is to it. It’s in the past. Now it’s time to move on.”
Aiben had expected as much. Ballis was a man who lived very much in the present. Usually, he was quite passionate, but talk of the past often wrung the emotion right out of him. For years, Aiben had tried to figure out why this was, but he had only ever learned one thing: the man’s eyes were the true measure of his state of being. The depth and complexity they betrayed during these times exposed the true turmoil that raged behind them.
“Thought that’s what you’d say. Guess I shouldn’t even bother.”
“OK, look, ten years ago there was this holocast they did on me, said I was a military hero of the Seven Guilds. They told everyone about the medals for bravery and valor they gave me. Nobles from the jaded halls of the Old Houses…” Ballis stretched out his arms wide “…all the way down to the lowliest workers in the Guilds that dominate our economy knew my name.” He brought his hands so close together they were almost touching, as if to show Aiben how even the minutest of citizens had been aware of him. “I was Colonel Ballis Ceimor, hero of the Nor Joon uprisings. They said the most searched for topics at the time were, and I quote, ‘my rugged dark looks, angular jaw, scarred cheek, and muscular frame’. My charisma and efficient mind were supposed to be the stuff of legend, you know.”
The sarcasm was not lost on Aiben.
“I’m a simple starship mechanic now who works on a small industrial planet, in a small insignificant docking garage, and just tries to escape my past. That was my decision, and no one else’s business. It’s the same with Nairom.”
“OK, I hear you.” Things were finally starting to make some sense. A constant war waged inside his friend between the past adventure he yearned for and the present simplicity he had settled for in order to protect his anonymity. That’s what wiped away his emotional connection to the past.
“At least you know how to deal with fate,” Aiben said.
The retired soldier, his features coarsened these days with smeared grease and stubble, just laughed. “You mean I know how to hide from it. Come on now, enough chatter. Let’s get back to work.”
“Wait, there they are.” Aiben saw movement and pointed at one of docking struts that arched a hundred stories above them. “Just one more minute…”
An access causeway butted up against the side of the orbital ferry and people marched out of it like a line of ants stepping out of time. Aiben sent a ping into the hypernet. He hoped to connect with Nairom, but as usual, the contact failed. With one last effort, he powered up the range of his enhanced senses, and swept them across the moving black dots. None of them was Nairom.
“Any luck?” Ballis asked.
“No, nothing. It’s the exact same thing every week since he left Besti. I’ve been hoping for the past year that he’s coming in on that ferry.” Aiben shrugged. “Guess I’m just wasting my time.”
“Looks like you’re the one who’s going to have to learn how to accept fate,” Ballis said. “You need to acknowledge that he might never come back.”
“I can’t help but wonder where he is, though.” Aiben clenched his teeth, a habit that caused his jaw muscles to spasm and an eyebrow to twitch. “With the war going on…” but Aiben didn’t want to think through a situation that he wasn’t ready to face yet.
“Well, he might be out there somewhere doing who knows what, but right now you’re here.” Ballis’s cobalt eyes sparkled in the morning sun. “That means you need to get that particle-shield generator fixed before mid-day. You know how Raatha feels about his precious ship. I hate to think what will happen if repairs fall behind schedule. Now for the last time, get working!”
Ballis slapped Aiben’s shoulder with a callused hand and dissolved back into the shadows of the garage, tools rattled in his wake. Aiben looked down at his feet. A small laser housing had found its way there among the gathering dust. He kicked it away. It bounced across the dirty cement floor where they had strewn a hundred mechanical and electrical starship components.
“Why did he have to leave?” Aiben said quietly to himself. “Why didn’t I have the guts to go with him?” The young, part-time mechanic took a deep breath, let it out in a slow calculated sigh, and turned towards the pile of jury-rigged electronic components and optical wiring that would have to pass as a generator.
Before too long, Ballis was back at Aiben’s side to check on his progress. Aiben held up the assembled lump of machinery. Ballis’s brows drew together, but he nodded approval as he turned it around in his hands to inspect it.
“You know, I was still pretty young when Oand-ib rescued me from the slum orphanage,” Aiben said. “I thought he was like my new father and teacher all rolled into one.” He sat down on a makeshift bench they had assembled in the open-air foyer of the garage. Ballis joined him. Aiben continued, “To tell you the truth, I can’t really remember anything about my life before coming to this industrial pit of a city. All I can conjure up are a lot of distorted images and bizarre sounds. Oand-ib brought me to Roonagor, gave me a new home with the cybermancers, and made me one of their apprentices, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I don’t really know what life was like anymore without the nanomechs. Oand-ib taught me how to control them even before I learned to read and write.”
“Yep,” was all Ballis said as he tweaked a connection on the generator. He already knew all of this, of course.
“Nairom was one of the memories that started the day my life began in Roonagor. He didn’t have any family either, except Oand-ib. We were like soldiers, you know. Common needs allowed us to bond quickly. We became inseparable comrades, brothers in a world governed by the strict traditions of the Cybermancer Guild.”
Ballis nodded. He could understand that analogy.
“At first, it was just friendly competition. We drove each other to learn faster than the other cybermancer apprentices. As we got better and better, I didn’t think it really mattered who won and who lost, just sharing our triumphs and disappointments with each other seemed to cement what I assumed was an unbreakable friendship.”
“How old were you two again when you started here?” Satisfied, Ballis placed the generator on the floor in front of them and leaned back.
“Seventeen,” Aiben said.
“Never could figure out why you two came to me.”
“Oand-ib thought it would be a good idea if we found jobs that supplemented our cybermancer training. Something we could learn without using nanomechs. Nairom saw you working your magic in the garage one day and since your reputation is well-known in Roonagor…”
“OK, let’s not exaggerate,” Ballis said.
Aiben smiled and thought back on the day. “Nairom had to convince me to approach you with him. Remember, you refused to take us on at first, didn’t think we could learn one end of a starship from the other.”
“I’m still not sure you can, but you were tenacious, I’ll give you that. Guess that’s what won me over in the end. Maybe I even saw a little bit of my younger self in you two. Oand-ib once told me he wanted me to help you build character and I needed a lot of that when I was my younger self.”
“Really?”
“Don’t go there,” Ballis warned with a raised eyebrow. “Remember, we’re talking about you.”
“Well, Oand-ib really wanted us to become cybermancers and serve the Guild like he does. It didn’t take us long, though, to make plans of our own. We dreamed of becoming the best starship mechanics on all of Besti, maybe even in the whole Seven Guilds. Present company excluded, of course.” Aiben chuckled at that, but then his mien darkened like the sooty clouds hovering above them. “And then Hezit came and ruined everything.”
“And we come back around to that,” Ballis groaned.
Aiben ignored him and pressed forward. “When Oand-ib learned that Hezit claimed to be a master cybermancer, he warned us about him. He told us Hezit was a rogue, which means he’s not registered with the Cybermancer Guild, and that we should stay away from him.”
“I remember you telling me that,” Ballis said.
“You have to agree, though, he was charismatic,” Aiben said. “When he showed interest in Nairom’s skills, Nairom couldn’t get enough of his praise. He acted like a little kid who was getting all the candy he ever wanted. All those adventures Hezit promised to lead him on just seemed to hypnotize him. It’s been exactly one year ago today that Nairom left with Hezit.” Aiben clenched his teeth; jaw and eyebrow twitched again.
“That explains why you can’t drop the subject today.” Ballis sounded a bit more sympathetic.
“We fought with each other the day he left. I still don’t know the reason why he was so mad at me. I turned our argument over and over so many times in my head that I thought the reason for it would somehow slosh out. It never did. Nairom grew faster and stronger than I did in that last year we were together, so he couldn’t have been jealous of me. Even now, I compare my skills to Nairom’s and judge myself by it.”
“You have to stop with that.” Ballis shook his head. “That’s the kind of thing that will ruin you in the end.”
“Yeah, I know. It just seems like I’m following along with Oand-ib’s plans to make me a cybermancer in the Guild now. Sometimes, I just go through the daily motions of being a cybermancer, and sometimes, my only goal in life seems to be the need for Oand-ib to accept what I can do, to let me know I am as good as Nairom was.” Although he didn’t admit it to Ballis, there were times that he pushed himself to the brink of mental and physical breakdown to exact such praise from his teacher, which was difficult because of his biomechanical augmentation.
“You’ve got to start living your own life, Aiben.”
“You know what, Ballis, you’re right,” Aiben pushed up from the bench. “It is time to move on and forget.” Aiben secretly hoped a growing relationship with one of the other cybermancers, a beautiful woman named Achanei, would be the new balm for his old wounds.
“Now you’re making sense,” Ballis stood and clapped Aiben on the back.
But can I ever really accept who I am? It was a battle Aiben had fought with himself for as long as he could remember. It raged especially strong within him these days. A sharp stab in his forearm followed the thought, quick but intense. He imagined for an instant that a razor-sharp blade had cut into his bone. He grimaced, but tried his best to ignore the excruciating pain. It had become a common enough occurrence lately. It was an agonizing twinge in his limb, which the nanomechs couldn’t seem to pinpoint and repair. Not even conventional medicine had been able to tell him the cause of it. It only occurred when he pondered the tangle his life had become recently.
“Right, pull yourself together, Aiben,” he announced out loud.
Ballis grinned and retreated again into his light-shy domain, whistling as he went as if all was set right again in his slice of the world. Aiben took one last look into the bright oily sky, telling himself it would be the last. He shielded his eyes with one hand; the other clenched the energy modulator he had just connected to the generator. He could almost imagine Nairom’s ship appear out of the sky and race over the tops of the city’s jagged buildings to set down on one of the giant landing platforms that hovered above him.
He almost didn’t believe it when he saw the shadows that sprang up against the glare of the morning sun. At first, they were indiscernible shapes, but soon became angels of death silhouetted by a halo of bright, yellow-red fire. As they crossed over the city, their profiles transformed into the distinct outlines of Zenzani attack ships. They had penetrated the planet’s atmosphere at incredible speed. Almost instantly, a sonic boom crashed down, as the fighters, too numerous to count, rocke
ted overhead with such deafening force that Aiben thought his eardrums would burst. The exhaust of chemical fuel spewed out of their engines and descended upon Roonagor like a black shroud of impending doom.
CHAPTER 2
Aiben bounded out of the small hoverflyer and took off through the pedestrian walkways. He weaved his way through the crowds already forming as people heard the pounding of the flyby and spilled out into the streets. The constant buzz of hover-traffic slid along the city’s main electromagnetic arteries behind him. It was more hurried and frantic than usual.
A wind whipped at his face, assaulted his nostrils, and stung his eyes with the manufactured fog of the city. He tuned down his senses so the stimuli wouldn’t overwhelm him. Suddenly, a brilliant flash of color covered the sky. A giant rainbow had sprung to life and then died in one massive spark of light. The Zenzani had brought down the old planetary shield network. More attack ships would be swarming down from their carrier high up in orbit.
The Zenzani Protectorate was a brutal regime that held an ever-expanding mass of worlds in violent subjugation. Its hungry belly grew in girth as it gobbled up more and more planets. The Protectorate’s principal architect, Magron Orcris, had seized power by promising victory against enemies that had decimated the Zenzani homeworld centuries earlier in a war whose cause was all but forgotten.
The Zenzani’s awakened bloodlust, bolstered by Magron’s fanaticism, compelled them forward to conquer unceasingly. Magron clamped the yoke of dictatorship on the necks of hundreds of billions with unwavering resolution, his iron will having been hardened by the forges of war. Where peace had once spread its fingers among the Seven Guilds, war now curled its fist in domination.
Aiben had been trying to link his thoughts with Oand-ib or Achanei ever since the fighter wing had thundered through Roonagor’s airspace. Something was wrong; he couldn’t sense the hypernet at all. His cyberlink to it was hot, but there was nothing there for him to connect to. Aiben couldn’t remember ever experiencing the absence of the network before. It terrified him that his mind was cut off from the others and it was beyond his control. It was a painful and mystifying silence.