No Shelter Among the Stars

Chapter 5- Spiro

He could feel his legs. They felt solid and full. They felt sore.  He could feel an itch at the soles of his feet, and the back of his knees. He kept his eyes on his work. Looking down at the nutrient tank that contained half his body only served to remind him that any itches on his legs or feet were currently unscratchable. The long threads of nerves sprouting from his genetically engineered body, gave all sorts of feeling to his mostly nonexistent limbs. Not for the first time he wished some other part of his legs had decided to regrow first, at least he was finally starting to get some rudimentary bone structure and musculature. When he glanced down at it in moments of weakness he could see the semi-clear white crystalline form being shaped. It looked almost like ice crystals.

His fingers tapped across the keys of his console. Software code and digital readouts flashed across his screens. The H.Ks (Hunter Killers), or "goons" as his compatriots called them, were all dormant. Targeting systems opened up before him in carefully mapped detail. Spiro's eyes darted through the programs running new battle algorithms. He knew more or less some of the key functions that needed refinement, but he refused to make any inexact changes.

This meant long and careful study. He had time. The hyperspace journey would give him several standard days. He worked through levels of targeting and judgment protocols, making careful notes on a separate section of one of his screens. This, the inner workings of his machines, gave him something beyond mere work for his mangled body. There was purity in the automated soldiers, not in what they did, but how they did it.

Long stretches of carefully choreographed responses made his machines seem almost alive, but they were far more dependable than any actual life form.

He cared for them. To the others, his machines were simply stolen Syndicate guard robots, but they were far more than that. Spiro had realized it when the Captain had gone snake eyes and greased three of their men. Men had no regulatory system guiding their responses, which meant at the wrong moment anyone could do anything.

He wondered sometimes who would be next, the next one of them to turn on the crew. Another betrayal like the last and they wouldn't be a crew anymore, just one or two survivors in a stolen ship. Assuming, of course, that there were any survivors at all.

"Syndicate chats," he murmured, finding a bug hidden within layers of code. It didn't seem to be causing any obvious malfunction, but he scrubbed it anyway. Then he began scanning the other H.Ks for a similar defect.

Such basic creation flaws were incredibly frustrating. He closed his eyes and let his music pound through him. When he paused like this, he could feel his industrial opera sending trickling sensations across his skin.

The grinding rhythm caressed his mind. These were sounds culled from rivers of data and reorganized according to a digitized mathematical system. He never turned it off. He slept with it and worked in it. It flooded his senses and released him from hard reality.

Feeling the music flow through him he finished debugging and paused for a moment. A sound of hydraulics pushed against his mind and he could feel the movement. His head nodded to it and it prickled the hairs on his bare neck. The implacable motion of functioning machinery made his own muscles, his limbs and his joints tingle with something like exercise. He could slip into a world of motion, a place beyond the nutrient tank prison and his mangled, regenerating, limbs.

The symbols and running program languages on his screen faded into a hostile jungle creeping over walls of stone and steel. He saw electrified fences coated in jerking bodies. The smell of cooking meat filled his nostrils. That smell lingered over everything back in that wretched place, back on Carnival. It had been as if the whole planet were a massive barbecue pit. Sometimes the smell mixed with the cold metallic scent of warm blood or the sharp stench of open bowels...