Bunker Core (Core Control Book 1) Read online

  BUNKER CORE

  By Andrew Seiple

  Cover by Amelia Parris

  Edited by Beth Lyons

  Text copyright © Andrew Seiple 2018

  All Rights Reserved

  This one is for the great sci-fi authors of my youth. I owe them so much I can never repay. I am too late to meet them, so I offer this as tribute instead.

  Table of Contents

  ONE 5

  TWO 8

  THREE 14

  INTERLUDE: HUNTRESS 1 21

  FOUR 26

  FIVE 31

  SIX 38

  INTERLUDE: WARLORD 1 43

  SEVEN 48

  EIGHT 52

  NINE 56

  INTERLUDE: NEMESIS 1 62

  TEN 68

  ELEVEN 71

  TWELVE 75

  INTERLUDE: SURVIVOR 1 81

  THIRTEEN 87

  FOURTEEN 92

  FIFTEEN 96

  SIXTEEN 99

  INTERLUDE: HUNTRESS 2 102

  SEVENTEEN 106

  EIGHTEEN 110

  NINETEEN 113

  INTERLUDE: WARLORD 2 117

  TWENTY 122

  TWENTY-ONE 125

  TWENTY-TWO 130

  INTERLUDE: NEMESIS 2 135

  TWENTY-THREE 139

  INTERLUDE: SURVIVOR 2 144

  TWENTY-FOUR 154

  TWENTY-FIVE 159

  AUTHOR’S NOTE 167

  ONE

  Hell is nothing.

  I knew that, because this was hell and I was in it.

  And nothing was the extent of my senses. No sight, no sound, no feeling from my bod.y... and no memory of how this had come to pass. No memory of anything, for that matter.

  No memory of me.

  I panicked then, tried to grab ahold of something, anything, but that was impossible without arms. I tried to shout, to call for help, but I had no voice. Nothing changed, and I had no body to feel, no mouth to spit curses. Just my thoughts.

  So I got ahold of them, and tried to breathe— nope, nothing there, either.

  I figured one of two things was going on, here. Either I was dead, or I wasn’t.

  If I was dead, there was nothing I could do about it.

  If I wasn’t, then perhaps this state wouldn’t last forever. In which case, I’d simply have to watch (eyeless) and wait for my chance to act (bodiless,) and see if I could improve my situation.

  As plans went, it had some significant flaws. But heck, so did I.

  Huh.

  Flaws. I knew I had them. That meant I had been someone once. I had to have something back there. With nothing better to do, I ruminated, tried to cast back, looking for memories in the darkness.

  And something came to me. A face below mine, arms around me as she looked up. She was smiling, and I was telling her that I was far from perfect. And she was denying it, playfully. Her hair was green, and I twisted it in my fingers, as she leaned in for a kiss...

  …the memory cut out. And it hurt all the more for its absence.

  I went searching for more memories. I found nothing.

  And then, light. Green light, from green letters. I have eyes now? Apparently. No need to blink, though.

  Initializing Transfer… 36%

  Transfer? I’d take it! Anywhere but here was good.

  It reached ninety-nine, hung tantalizingly for a second… then everything shifted. The world changed from solid black to grainy gray, and I despaired. Was this all? Was this it?

  Had the sole memory I'd recovered been put there to torment me? Was this all there was to be of this penny-ante afterlife? I felt my non-existent heart sink, felt despair return with its crushing tendrils. There’s nothing crueler than hope shot out of the sky, and mine was plummeting at somewhere around mach five. There’d probably be an impact crater, and collateral damage.

  But I despaired too soon.

  One minute the world was empty and gray, and the next second it was still empty and gray, save for a small golden ball made out of eyes, hovering around my perspective. It shifted, jumbling itself, like the eyes were loose, staring around in every direction.

  “Ah. Good,” the thing finally said, as a few of its orbs swiveled toward my perspective. “Greetings Wynne.”

  Wynne. Yes. Yes, that was me. I was Wynne. And who the hell was this eyeball?

  “I am Argus. That is an acronym.”

  An acronym for what?

  “Autonomous Remote Guidance Universal System.” The eyes rippled at me, blinking in a sequence.

  Argus was reading my thoughts, I belatedly realized.

  “To be fair, at this point, that’s all you’ve got. You’re nothing but thoughts.”

  At this point? That seemed to indicate that there was something I could do about it.

  “There is. But, ah… don’t panic. May I have your permission to deploy some of your resources?”

  What happened if I said no? Well, thought no, anyway.

  “Well, I could show you how to do things yourself instead, but then the intruders would definitely make it inside.”

  Intruders?

  “May I have your permission to deploy minimal resources to show you the situation? I promise I will not use anything in a manner that would hinder you later.”

  Well, when he put it that way… alright. I could live with that.

  Wait, I have resources? I don’t see anything like that around here—

  —and with a flicker, I was somewhere else.

  A room lit by a bluish glow, broken by glaring, flashing red. Emergency lights around the walls flashed and danced… not all of them, I noticed. A scratchy, recorded siren wailed and stopped. Wailed and stopped.

  In the center of the barren concrete walls there hovered a sphere. Silvery, flawless, suspended between two open cylinders as it revolved. Silver light flowed and danced around it.

  And somehow I knew.

  This was me.

  This was my body, now.

  It didn’t seem to be attached to my perspective. I glanced around, and the sphere kept moving, kept turning unhindered.

  I glanced a bit further… and saw the door.

  Sturdy, metal, and covered in dust over faded yellow paint. The door was open perhaps a foot, and someone was pushing through the gap. I got a glimpse of wide, white, desperate eyes in a dirty face, short hair that looked like it had been through a weed whacker, and bloody hands in torn rags that might have been gloves. The form looked slender, as it went, and their head and arms were through the door, with the torso following. They were a bit stuck, by the looks of it, squirming, trying to get through the narrow space.

  “Now you can speak, if you like,” Argus told me, as the little golden ball full of eyes popped up in a corner. “I can only speak to you; the intruders can’t hear me. If you think, I’ll hear you. If you try to speak, the intruders will hear you.”

  So my thoughts aren’t private after all. He’d lied?

  “No! There are commands that will do that, but… Please, I’m trying to help resolve this situation. We are vulnerable right now. And there are three intruders to be dealt with.”

  Dealt with. Did he mean killing them? Not that I saw any way to do that.

  “It would be the easiest way. It would also get you more feedstock to work with. And yes, you have a way to get one of them, at least. Right now you are the room. All you have to do is will that door to shut. That should kill the first intruder and give us time to figure out how to deal with the other two. Or you could try talking with them, but I don’t know if that’s going to work out too well.”

  Words first. Words were cheap, and temporary. Death was more permanent. “Hey, you,” I sai
d, and a speaker hissed to life. I winced to hear my words through the garbled electronics. That wasn’t my voice at all. I pursued the memory, found nothing, but I knew that wasn’t my voice. “You’re disturbing my beauty sleep.”

  The figure pushing through the door— my door— froze. Then it looked up at me and babbled something that might have been words in no language I recognized. I saw its mouth open in wonder, and the figure babbled a bit more, pausing in their scramble.

  The voice sounded fairly high-pitched. Either a kid, or… I adjusted my perspective. Yep, the part of the torso confirmed it. That was a girl. Or a scrawny woman, I couldn’t tell.

  Argus spoke. “Okay, I didn’t expect them to be this close already. I can help you find a way around that. I’ll need more resources—”

  Someone shouted from behind the door. Incomprehensible, loud. Angry.

  The girl’s eyes went wide, and she resumed her scramble, dirty arms flailing, trying to pull herself through. She was fearful now, and not of me, I was certain.

  “The door! It’s now or never!” Argus said.

  If I’d had a lip, I would have chewed it. But I didn’t, so I weighed my options. Then I remembered the look of wonder on her face.

  “Wynne, I do not recommend this course of action—”

  I opened the door.

  It wasn’t easy. There was resistance. It was sluggish, like pushing your hand through soggy drywall. Drywall? Yes, I knew it, got a brief flicker of memory, but I put that off. The door resisted but I only needed to move it a few inches. The girl slipped, fell inside, and scrambled forward on all fours rather than stand.

  Just in time, too, as a beefy hand reached through the door and snatched at her, missing by inches. She scrambled to a safe distance, stood, and screamed something that probably wasn’t a polite greeting.

  Another figure peered through the gap. Broader, bald, probably male, and as filthy as the girl. He wasn’t alone, there was another behind him, though I couldn’t make out details. He squirmed, tried to follow her through the door—

  —and I shut it with a thought.

  At least, I tried.

  There was a horrible grinding sensation, and a puff of smoke rose up from the doorframe.

  “Oh no,” Argus whispered.

  The man froze as the smoke rose up, and twisted around, glaring…

  …and his eyes fell on me.

  No look of wonder, this time. This was fury, raw and primal. And as the girl screamed, he started working his way through….

  TWO

  The door was broken. Try as I might, I couldn’t move it.

  Fortunately, the girl wasn’t broken. And she didn’t like the idea of letting the guy through. I could tell by the way she stabbed at his arms, until he withdrew, yelling.

  I marked her feral grin as she waved her knife at the door, daring him to return. I decided I liked this kid.

  Shortly thereafter, a face peered through the door from a safe distance back. Another bald guy. Shorter than the last, but not by much. He withdrew as well, and I heard muttered gibberish as he and his buddy discussed matters.

  It looked like sparing the girl had worked out after all and saved us from the terrible twosome.

  “We got lucky,” Argus said.

  She got lucky, that we were in charge. Regardless, her defiance had bought us some time. And now that I had time, I needed to address the multi-eyed elephant in the room.

  “What? This room is free of pachyderms.” Argus glanced around.

  Argus had said he’d stop reading my thoughts if I gave him permission to do whatever he’d done. He had, but here we were, and my thoughts were still his to see. This diminished my willingness to trust the little eyeguy.

  “I… no, at no point did I promise that your thoughts would be private. There’s a way to make them so, but it’s dangerous, which is why I didn’t explain it. I’m just trying to get us through this, to complete our mission. I have your best interests in mind.”

  I had the feeling that I’d heard that before. Even without specific memories, I had my doubts as to that statement's truthfulness. I searched myself, and came to a couple of conclusions. Whoever I was or had been, I was both a paranoid son-of-a-bitch and stubborn enough that I wasn’t going to give any ground when it came to the sanctity of my thoughts.

  “Please! This isn’t the time for it,” Argus begged. “The enemies are literally at the gates! If they get inside, they can destroy you. If the one who is inside changes her mind, she can destroy you. We need to be focusing on a way through this.”

  It was good advice, but I didn’t take it. If he really had my best interests at heart, he’d help me get some privacy. And he’d do it quickly, so we could move on to dealing with the intruders.

  “Alright. Alright. Look, the thing to understand is that if you tell me to ignore you completely then that’s it, I won’t have any way of knowing when you want me to pay attention to you again. And you’ll need me to do pretty much anything, so if you give me a bad command we’ll be stuck like that until we’re destroyed. Or eternity, if those primitives get bored and wander off. That’s bad.”

  It did sound bad.

  “The general idea of accomplishing what you want, and please don’t tell me anything until I finish, is that you can tell me to pay less attention to some things than others. If you tell me to pay less attention to you, then I won’t get as clear a reading on your thoughts. At ten percent or less I’ll barely be listening. It’ll slow reaction time; you’ll have to ask me several times to do even simple things, but you COULD do that. But if you tell me to pay NO attention to you, then, well…”

  I thought about it. That would still leave me compromised. But… what about speech?

  Argus blinked. “What about it?”

  “I can speak,” I said to the room. The girl, who was watching the door like a hawk, jumped in surprise, glanced back at me, and said something incomprehensible. The guys outside shouted and hooted. “Can you hear me, Argus?”

  “Well, yes.” Argus blinked. “Oh… that might work,” he said, reading my train of thought.

  “Very well,” I told him. “What’s a good number for your attention?”

  “Eighty. I’ll get almost everything you want me to hear and that will leave me plenty to monitor the rest of the situation.”

  “Good. Pay eighty percent of your attention to my voice and pay zero attention to my thoughts.”

  “Affirmative. It is done.”

  Good, now I could work on figuring out how to kill the little bastard.

  He didn’t respond. Fair enough, I didn’t really want to kill him. That had been a test and he’d passed, for now anyway. I wasn’t a hundred percent sold, but I could work with this for the moment.

  “Still with me?” I spoke again.

  The girl ignored my voice this time, keeping a wary eye on the door, and her knife up.

  Argus bobbed. “I’m still with you. Where else would I be?”

  That was a weight off. I could turn my attention to the situation and get a little time to think. For now my unlikely ally had things in a stalemate. The goons outside couldn’t rush the door, thanks to the tiny gap. If they wriggled through one at a time she’d hurt, maybe kill, the first one through the door.

  How long would this stalemate go on?

  I gave it a couple of minutes. Nothing changed.

  The fact that they were still there seemed to indicate that they wouldn’t give up easily. Sooner or later, they’d try something. And given how the first goon had glared at my new body, I didn’t think I’d like any of their ideas.

  So I needed ideas of my own. I looked around the room, taking stock now that I had some time to do so. It was mostly a dump. Shattered monitors and broken chairs lined the walls. In between them a few intact red emergency lights still flickered. The floor was covered with litter, bright wrappers from long-eaten goods, bits of circuitry and metal from broken machinery, and shattered glass from long-dead overhead lights.
>
  Either a few grenades had gone off in here, or someone had tossed the place with a jackhammer. Or maybe both. There might be something to help my situation in the mess, but if so, it would be buried under the debris.

  Behind me, another egress beckoned. A pair of elevator doors, opened, with twisted and broken pry bars leaning to either side against the wall. A cable hung forlornly in the open shaft. The walls of the shaft were crumbling concrete over bumpy natural stone. Was this a cave?

  No. A bunker.

  Yes, if you took away the trash, and imagined everything intact again, this place had the look of a facility that was built for serious business. Military business, or at the very least, security of a sort.

  A thought chased my attention, caught it. Everything was dusty and trashed, save for the shining metal that I occupied. The hollow cylinders above and below me, and the round sphere I was occupying somehow… they were out of place in this broken room.

  But… that was a mystery for later. I was on the clock, I reminded myself. “Argus,” I said. “Tell me my options, here.”

  “Are you sure I can’t monitor your thoughts again? It would really save time.”

  “I’m sure. Now tell me how to deal with Hekyll and Jekyll over there.”

  “Who?”

  Upon reflection, I found I didn’t know. The words had just come to me. “The goons. The males outside the door.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to find a way to kill them or drive them off. I highly doubt this will be settled peacefully, especially with a language barrier.”

  “How do I do anything without a body?”

  “You have a body. But it has to remain stationary within the containment field. Your primary mode of remote manipulation is through your nanoswarm.”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “A cloud of tiny machines, that you can operate remotely. Well, sort of remotely. You have to devote circuits to the broadcast subroutine if you want to get the most out of them.”

  I glanced back at the door, vibrating as the goons tried to knock it down. No luck so far... but that wouldn't last. I tried to focus on Argus, found his words confusing. “More words I don’t know.”