Prologue: 60 Years Ago
Hector walked up and down the crew module, his strides precise down to the number of millimeters per second.
Most robots tried to downplay, even hide, the fact that they were robots. Not Hector. He was proud of his origins and not afraid to express his opinion that synthetic people were superior to biological people. He was smarter, more precise, and more emotionally stable than most humans he knew. He had an onboard computer and the most attuned senses technology could provide. He only had to eat once a week, and sleep was optional, but polite.
Against regulations, Hector was not at the controls. The autopilot had been decelerating the ship for several hours now. Currently, it was traveling in a slingshot orbit between the yellow sun and one of the local gas giants—a routine maneuver interstellar ships used to slow down. He had better things to do.
Hector thrilled at how the mission was going exactly according to plan. Twenty years ago, the ship had set out from Earth at near-lightspeed to colonize a distant green planet orbiting a tiny yellow star. Hector vividly remembered the send-off ceremony, when the crew was placed into cryogenic stasis and Hector was given command of the ship. Since then, he had been alone at the controls, patiently waiting for this day to come—the day he would wake the crew to join him in his perfectly controlled environment.
The autopilot chirped an automatic notification into his left ear. An intermittent power source was being detected around their new home. Hector ignored the information, assuming it was a glitch in the system. Why would there be a power reading so far out here? Telescopic and radiometric reconnaissance had already told them the green planet was uninhabited.
Hector walked the ship one last time, marveling at the perfect routine he had formulated. Row upon row of cryogenic tubes held the crew in stasis, and behind them were dozens of cargo bays filled with everything from modular anti-bacterial housing to biosphere modification systems. Hector had organized everything to precise specifications and cataloged the entire system in his mind.
Twenty years is, after all, a long time.
Hector stroked the faceplate on the cryogenic tube of a female colonist he had spent decades fantasizing about. In his imagination, he knew her inside and out, and she was perfection in every way. Her name was Angie, and she was a xenobiologist. Her chestnut hair spread out around her restful face, frozen in the chamber. The crew files said her eyes were brown, but he imagined they turned a deep green in the sunlight. She was his perfect match, everything he could ever hope for in a woman. Maybe even superior to most robots he knew. He had studied in utero surgical techniques along with nanotechnology growth systems so that they could have cybernetic children together. First they would have a boy; then they would have a girl. Their children would be the best of both worlds—machine and human—combined from the day they were conceived. Out here, there would be no infant surgery laws to stop them.
The autopilot chirped its notification in his ear again, and with a put-upon sigh, Hector entered the cockpit. The viewscreen had turned foggy from the heat of braking through the sun's atmosphere. Hector bounced his way into his seat and strapped in as the ship slammed its way through the braking orbit.
The ship was white-hot when it exited the sun, but traveled at a much more reasonable speed now. It floated towards the beautiful emerald planet that would soon be their home. It was a miracle; a tiny blossom of life in the vast, cold, empty wasteland of space.
They were finally here.
The sensor alert chirped in his ear again, and he examined the ship's controls. He frowned as he read the screens. A pulsing yellow dot indicated that they were picking up an energy signal—faint, but unmistakable—from behind the planet. It annoyed Hector that something so trivial was desecrating the glory of their arrival. It had to be a comet or some other natural phenomenon. No matter. He would deliver his people to their new home safely and on-time, with or without this irritation.
The ship closed on the planet, and now Hector could make out huge green landmasses and the iridescent color of the seas. It was breathtaking and beautiful, so much so that he needed another prompt from the autopilot to begin the final braking orbit around the planet. He held the pearlescent green planet in his sights, rotating the ship to face the planet. Decades after they left the crowded pollution of Earth, it was finally time to build a wilderness paradise of their own.
The chirp sounded in his ear again just as a bright pinprick of light blinded him from behind the planet.
He had just enough time to squint and shade his eyes before the interior of the ship exploded.
There was a vicious metallic ripping sound behind him, and the deafening roar of superheated atmosphere exploded around him.
Blinded by a brightness that filled him with pain, Hector screamed in agony as the skin melted off his carbon nanofiber musculature,. The ship plunged into the atmosphere. The blast was just enough to tip its heat control systems over the edge. Most of the hull ignited into liquid plasma.
The cockpit had been ripped off the ship, and Hector found himself screaming down into the iridescent atmosphere of the planet, watching the liquid droplets that were all that remained of his colony spatter and explode around him. Emergency shielding bubbles popped into life around molten bits of the flaming wreckage, trying to protect pieces of the ship that had already been destroyed. The bubbles burst uselessly as the molten wreckage burned them from the inside. The cockpit's emergency shielding bubble did manage to activate in time, though, and Hector was thrown with deceleration as the nose of the ship tried desperately to save its occupant.
The world became a spinning, senseless blur as he fell for a full thirty minutes, thrashing at his melted skin and screaming with rage and helplessness. This world that seemed to be a dream come true just a few minutes ago was now an indescribable nightmare. Every bit of metal debris that hit the outside of his shielding bubble made him want to sob and jump into the deadly atmosphere after it.
He didn't sense much of the initial impact, just had a vision of dirt exploding upwards. His entire body was crushed into the seat and thrown around like a rag doll. He bounced at least four times before he lost count, wishing for unconsciousness or death but receiving neither. Soon, what was left of the ship’s nose came to a rest, and the emergency shielding bubble croaked pathetically and died.
Hector’s human surface was gone. He was now a living display of human musculature sculpted out of stretchy black honeycomb. He looked around wildly, gasping in panic and pain. Somehow, he managed to feel for the computer antenna behind his ear.
What happened to the colony ship?
Vaporized on reentry. No possibility of survivors.
Hector shrieked and sobbed some more, his emotion circuits overloaded with the horror of it all. Around him, however, it was a beautiful day on the green planet; birds and reptiles chirped, and the lowing of large mammals could be heard in the distance. He had never experienced the mix of emotions coursing through his body: loss and failure; amazed joy at surviving such horrors; and crushing guilt over that joy.
Help, he thought. I need to get help.
Hector rummaged through the gear in the crushed remains of the cockpit and was astonished to find the emergency transmitter beacon functional and intact. It blinked curiously at him from its nearly indestructible chrome container. Hector felt a flash of bitterness that this box had survived but none of the crew capsules had. He opened the control panel and pressed a series of buttons, causing the box to unfurl itself into a small round dish and a set of hyperspace antennas. The beacon began transmitting its emergency signal off-planet and directly into his ear. He carefully rearranged the tatters of his uniform to get his emotions under control.
After a few minutes, a startled-looking woman in a severe white uniform appeared above the box in hologram. She stared at him with undisguised shock. She looked somewhere off-camera and then stared back at him, unable to believe what she was seeing.
“Humanoid Extrasolar Colonial Transport Operation Robot 971263 reporting in.” He cleared his throat to keep his voice from cracking. “Our colony was attacked and destroyed on entry by an unknown energy source. The ship burned in the atmosphere, and I am the only survivor.” He flushed with shame at having to admit his failure out loud, even if on some level he didn't believe it was his fault. “P-please advise.”
Images of his perfect, lovely frozen bride flashed in his mind along with visions of her burning alive in the atmosphere. She was awake as she fell, thrashing and screaming in terror.
The holographic woman searched off-screen again and seemed at a loss for words.
Another man in a severe white uniform appeared, putting his hand on the woman's shoulder. “You're a Hector unit, are you not?”
Rage filled Hector at the idiotic question. “I said that I was. I require rescue from a hostile planet so that we may begin an inquiry into what happened to my colony ship. My people are dead, sir, and I...would like to know why. Please advise.”
“Hector, you say there are no other survivors from the colony ship?”
“None. I saw them burn, sir.” Hector swallowed hard and looked away. “Something shot us down. Most of the ship burned in the atmosphere.” He resisted the insane urge to make a little fwish motion with his hand.
No, he must keep it together. That way lies madness. “Please help me survive and find out what happened.”
“You will survive, Hector,” the man reassured him. “Just find yourself a safe, inconspicuous place to hide, and shut yourself down until help arrives.”
“Shut down?” A stab of fear lanced Hector's heart. “I haven't shut down in more than forty years.”
“You'll need to now, son,” the man insisted in gentle but firm tones. “Help is on the way. But we need you to shut down so we can find you.”
“That makes no sense,” Hector countered, feeling more than a little suspicious. “You aren't coming to rescue me at all, are you?”
“Of course we are.” The man was lying, poorly enough to make Hector flinch. “Just shut down. That's an order.”
“That's not an order I can obey. Sir. These colonists need justice.”
“Can you shut it down from here?” The man asked the woman, who began typing furiously on her computer.
“Don't do this—you can't do this! Sir!”
“I got it!” The woman exclaimed. “Just have to send—”
Hector ripped the guts out of the transmitter and threw them aside. The machine beeped erratically then died.
Hector shrieked at the top of his artificial lungs for thirty-four seconds, then found himself alone with the sound of birds and the rustling of wind through the trees. After twenty years of waiting, there would be no end to his solitude—no perfect wife, no children, no colony in paradise. In less than forty minutes, his future had been transformed from a utopian heaven into a fight for survival. A dirty, messy, imperfect fight for survival, abandoned by his leaders. Leaders who had a remote off-switch for him. He'd have to figure out where that was and fix it. He stared down at himself in horror; his melted skin was covered in mud and debris. He’d never felt so filthy in his life.
Hector was considering his options when he heard a rustling sound off to his right side. He jumped back and reached for his sidearm, but it was lost in the crash. He stared in horror as a tangle of living copper wires wriggled out of a nearby bush. They moved as one, a mass of metal worms slithering in his direction with a palpable sense of hunger.
Hector backed away slowly, stark fear on his face for the first time since the ship had exploded. What if the telescopic reconnaissance had been wrong? What if there was intelligent life on the planet after all? It was possible that he had been shot down—who knew what this thing could be?
The creature shifted its course and continued to follow him. Hector turned and ran, instinctively understanding that this creature meant him harm. He needed to learn the planet's ecosystem, find its predators, and figure out what this thing was. He whimpered unconsciously as he ran.
He made it about two hundred and fifty feet when a mismatched group of large carnivorous beasts appeared from the forest. They snarled and hissed, their leafy camouflaged fur rippling around mouths filled with row after row of teeth. Several were the size of ancient mastodons. He was quickly surrounded.
Hector stood at attention, struggling to regain his composure. He didn't want to die now that he was faced with it, but he wasn't willing to go out as a coward, either.
The carnivores made no move to kill him, though. Instead, they cut off his escape options. More of the weird living copper wires appeared from the creatures' nostrils and ear canals and wiggled in the air curiously. Hector stared, entranced, as the wires burrowed into the predators’ living flesh. Were they parasites?
He turned and found himself staring down another mass of wires—the one that he had first heard in the bushes. It slithered towards him hungrily. Hector backed away until he crashed into the fur of a giant, elephantine terror. He was hedged in.
Intelligent, coordinated behavior, Hector noted as the parasite shuddered closer. What were these things?
The wires crawled up his body, and the forest shook with Hector's bellowing scream. But as he felt his body violated, invaded by this strange parasite, he found that he only had one real thought on his mind.
Vengeance.