Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [260]
“She’s not going to come with an instruction sheet!” Caleb snapped.
The woman turned but did not acknowledge them. She took another step.
Andrew came skidding up next to them. “She’s alive! Karla, you’ve come back.”
Crackling with secondhand wental power, she plodded along. With each step, energy shimmered out of her like cold flames, sending tiny cracks and shivers through the solid ice of the ground. Steam began to curl up around her.
Rlinda looked at BeBob. “I don’t like this very much. Seems like an awfully chilly reception...no pun intended.”
“Karla, why won’t you say anything? Don’t you remember us?” Andrew stepped into her slow but relentless path. He reached out to grab Karla’s upper arms to make her look at him.
But as soon as his fingers touched the ice-woman’s crackling skin, Andrew screamed, caught in a sudden discharge that flowed from her body into his like a power surge. In a dismissive gesture, Karla swung her hand and knocked him aside, as if he were no more than a lightweight piece of garbage. Spasming in silence, Andrew tumbled in a broken heap on the ice.
Rlinda could tell with a glance that the younger man was dead—either burned or electrocuted.
The reanimated woman stopped and swiveled her head. Her eyes were black, bottomless, empty depths. Steam continued to rise around her like a faint fog. Seeing what she had done, Karla flexed her hand, raised it up so she could stare at her own fingers. Then she looked back at the body of murdered Andrew. Her pale lips curved upward in a satisfied smile.
Chapter 135—DD
Once the operation was complete and the compy’s internal systems were purged of basic rules and prohibitions, DD did not feel fundamentally different. With or without the programming restrictions, he did not wish to hurt anyone, particularly not his human masters, who had always treated him well.
Sirix would never understand that.
Now that DD had his free will, the Klikiss robots turned him loose and left him unsupervised in the dark and storm-swept ruins. They had other plans afoot, thousands upon thousands of reawakened Klikiss machines and a large assembly of Soldier compies ready to seize the EDF fleet.
For days, robots streamed through the transportals to Szeol, and then moved elsewhere, setting up additional bases, establishing further beachheads from which they could prosecute their genocide against mankind.
When all the robots had gathered, Sirix spoke like a general giving orders to his troops. “We have withdrawn our comrades from inhabited worlds. As we enter this ultimate phase, all Soldier compies distributed throughout the Earth Defense Forces have their ingrained programming. According to the standardized timing sequence, the uprising will occur simultaneously across the entire Hansa military. Soon.”
DD was no longer part of their activities. Once Sirix had accomplished what he intended, his interest in the compy waned. After the Klikiss robots and corrupted Soldier compies turned on the Earth Defense Forces and slaughtered the human race, they would get back to liberating the rest of the compies.
Left to explore Szeol as he wished, DD wandered around the dim landscape during the murky days and purplish nights. Monstrous creatures flew past him, composed of sharp wings and trailing tentacles and a far-from-ordinary number of eyes. Though DD cringed, the creatures ignored him as soon as they determined he was indigestible.
Bathed in faint sulfurous fumes, he looked at what had once been a grand Klikiss city. Even if the hatred inspired by the Klikiss race was warranted, the ancient creators were extinct now. And humans were not the same as the Klikiss.
Unfettered and unobserved, the little compy walked to the third trapezoidal framework erected on the canyon’s edge. Klikiss symbols surrounded the transportal, each tile indicating a different coordinate for a world that had once been part of the insectoid civilization. Though