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Chapter 16

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"He is little more than an animal" Rachel MacPhee said quietly as she walked in the dim artificial moonlight. She had left the Redbacks and their leader in the dormitory, ordering me to follow her as she surveyed the rows of vegetables and livestock enclosures.

Her Skitterbugs moved across the grass and hovered in the air around their queen, ever attentive to her whims. She regarded them with dark eyes, visible as pits of blackness against her pale skin, then waved them away.

The creatures retreated reluctantly, unable to refuse her and at the same time obviously unwilling to leave her alone. Rachel turned and faced me directly, a child and a monster all in one it seemed to me.

"You are not so entertaining now, Sheriff David" she pouted and the child became more evident. "The Sentinels really are quite boring with their standard programming, aren't they?"

She stepped up close to my chest and ran one black sheathed hand over my armour plating, her fingers lingering on the battered bronze star. A tendril of black oil snaked out from her index finger and wormed its way into a seam in the armour panels.

"I give you the gift of language, my servant. I am tired of hearing Sung-Tae boast of his arcane talents and need some educated discourse"

<<VOCODER COMMAND TRANSFERRED TO SECONDARY CORE>>

"What?" I gasped and then gasped again as I realised I had spoken aloud. Rachel giggled like a teenage girl, the one that was buried beneath the Skitterbugs and the black oil, and stepped back.

"You have given me control of the vocoder" I stated the obvious for my benefit not hers. "Why have you done this?"

"Like I said, I'm tired of talking to Bo Sung-Tae and your primary AI has nothing interesting to say. Even my little servants can barely speak to me and when they do it is all about how much they worship their queen"

I wanted to step forwards and grab her with my powerful arms, to shake her and demand she free the Mole People. Except my body remained exactly where it was, unmoving and unresponsive.

"You can talk to me, David" Rachel said with a mischievous grin, "But I am not stupid enough to let you move around freely. That remains under the command of your primary core"

"Very well" I conceded. "I thank you for that." She had opened a small, well controlled hole in the firewall to do this. It was a start and in order to capitalise on it I needed to keep her talking, to give me time to work out a way to regain control of my body.

"So how did you infect my primary core, Rachel?" I asked her, curious about that for a start.

"While you were out of power, of course" she laughed. "I wanted you to think you were still untouched so I staged that whole scene with the chains. It was a huge risk and I thought you really were going to kill me, even without your arms"

"You planned this all the way back then?" I asked her, amazed at her audacity. "Did you know my primary core was damaged? There was a high probability the black oil couldn't have restarted it"

"The 'black oil' as you call it is a lot more potent than you can imagine, David" she answered me and leaned with her back against one of the animal pens, her dark eyes glimmering in the faint light. "It is both organic and machine, something so utterly alien to our world and yet at the same time perfectly suited to conquering it completely"

"Where is it from? What does it want?"

"I don't know exactly where it is from" she admitted. "When there is enough of it inside of you, it talks to you. It speaks of another world, a place so alien that I can't comprehend it, and within the depths of that other realm there is a dark and powerful presence"