The Well of Lethe: 5

• Miss the start? The Well of Lethe: 1.
• Miss last week’s episode? The Well of Lethe: 4.

Korvus drifted through the colony. The conversation with Verity circled his mind, a dog chasing its tail, doomed to never catch it. He haunted the corridors, drifting with the eddy of his thoughts. He had no destination, except—for a reason he couldn’t put his finger on—to be closer to Verity. To continue talking to her.

That’s why he stayed away.

HERALD:||Your pulse is up.

It’s because I’m stressed.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You don’t have anything to be stressed about.

HERALD:||Not yet, anyway.

What’s that supposed to mean?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||The guards who returned to the unsanctioned intelligence had elevated body temperatures.

HERALD:||See? Your heart rate’s higher, because now you’ve got real problems.

What does it mean? Clearly Aris’s psychotropic fever is spreading. Is it significant? Korvus’s mind flipped through the facts of the case. The inmates trying to escape on his ship… and a fever outbreak with an astonishingly high R-naught. Was any of it related to the unsanctioned intelligence?

Wait.

Was Verity the unsanctioned intelligence?

You know what? We’ve made an assumption.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||That everyone likes you? Don’t worry, they don’t.

The Logos sent us—||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You. It sent you.

The Logos sent us here to investigate the unsanctioned intelligence. ‘Correct’ was a secondary objective.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||There’s no use for a Corrector without Correction.

Verity might not be why we’re here. Quantum Entanglement Anchor isn’t high bandwidth. The Logos won’t have video from here.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Well done. You’ve correctly—hah! Get it? Correctly for a Corrector?—identified why Correctors are dispatched.

What if she’s not the unsanctioned intelligence?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Who else could it be?

If you were a new super intelligence, what would you need?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Some serious ‘me’ time.

You’d also need a lot of power.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||If you start a fight near the reactor, try not to puncture the housing. This is one of those neither-of-us-will-survive things.

Who said anything about starting a fight?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||I mean, it’s you.

The Well was a prison, but it had a beating heart of energy like everywhere else humanity clawed a toehold. Korvus’s overlay showed a reactor nestled in the pit of the Well. It fed life to the station, and perhaps to something else as well. Korvus got the overlay to chart the fastest path into the Well’s depths. He followed the glowing line on his overlay.

He only made it five paces before the lights went out.

A moment later, they flickered back to life, strong and clean as if nothing had happened.

Mercer, do you have maintenance crews working on the reactor?||:KORVUS

MERCER:||You noticed the power issue too? Where are you?

On my way to the reactor. Stay where you are.||:KORVUS

Korvus found the Well’s main elevator and took it down. I hope the power stays on until I get to the bottom. It did, which let him exit into the reactor room: an enormous, dome-shaped atrium with large windows looking into the septic sewer of Lethe’s oceans. The lighting here wasn’t great, but at least it was on.

The reactor was housed in the middle of the atrium beneath a pool of water. A pillar of entombed conduit rose from below Korvus’s view to form a spire that reached the ceiling. The room was warm, uncomfortably so, which wasn’t a great sign for a reactor area.

Radiation?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||No. I can’t explain the heat, though.

Do a thorough scan. Something’s not right.||:KORVUS

The Herald System’s flechette cannon whined as it rose from behind his shoulder to point forward. Red light lased out as Herald scanned ahead. A wireframe of the reactor room’s interior filled in on his overlay.

No people.

Where is everyone?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Not lining up to be shot.

There should be a crew here. Automatons at least, doing the work if there aren’t people for it. But there was no one. 

He walked forward, his pace slowed by caution. The floor’s metal grating clanked under his armoured weight. Korvus reached the railing that guarded the edge of the reactor well. Beneath him was a pool of water, the depths husbanding a cool Cherenkov blue. Still no people, but he spied an abandoned maintenance robot. The unit should follow a worker, offering tools to a maintenance technician; it even housed a sizeable power core in case something needed a little juice.

Korvus traced a path back from the robot to a flight of metal stairs and made his way down. The reactor room held a slight hum, a choir of angels not quite out of earshot trying to find their tune. The Corrector reached the robot’s level and paced slowly toward it. The Herald’s laser mapping painted the area in red, dropping icons on Korvus’s overlay as it identified curious items. There, a cup of coffee, half-drunk and still warm. Beyond it, lying open and discarded on the metal grating of the floor, a maintenance manual. A dropped hydraulic wrench, the power lights still glowing a comforting green.

No maintenance technician, though.

Korvus crouched by the robot. It was open, a tool tray extended, an empty space left for the discarded wrench. He was almost ready to contact Mercer when Herald dropped something new on his overlay.

HERALD:||See that?

I do now. What is it?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Hey, you’re the one with hands. And, crucially here, legs. Go look.

Herald had identified a slight glistening on the metal flooring near a vent. Korvus walked toward it, his palm itching with desire to draw the Adjudicator. But a sidearm that fired black holes wasn’t a useful weapon near a reactor. Besides, the Herald System’s flechette solution was a more elegant solver of problems.

Korvus crouched, the glistening resolving into a thin, viscous substance coating the floor. He reached out with an armoured glove, his fingers coming back tacky, a thin mucous-like substance trailing from his fingertip back to the patch on the floor.

“What the fuck,” he said.

Herald, for once, was silent. That was ominous enough by itself because it meant the partial intelligence was using its processing power for something other than sarcasm.

Korvus shook the substance from his fingers, and it splattered onto the decking. He stood, looking around again. There was—still!—no one here.

A clank drew his attention. It was faint, sounding as if it came from across the reactor pool and down a level. Whatever made that noise would be close to the waterline.

He walked toward the metal stairs leading down, placing each foot carefully, easing his weight with each step to reduce noise. The Herald System’s turret whined by his ear as the muzzle nosed the air, seeking targets.

It’d almost be a relief to find something to shoot.

As it turned out, no: what came for Korvus wasn’t a relief. There were five of them, and they boiled from behind an equipment rack. Three men, two women, and, curiously, all naked.

That’s a detail we’ll need to review later.

Red light bathed the five as they charged Korvus, Herald marking each on his overlay. Height, projected mass based on visible body composition, speed of travel, armaments, and… body temperature.

By the Logos, they’re boiling alive.

All five had furnace-like temperatures, a cosy 60℃ that no human could survive. Their faces were mottled and bruised, reminding Korvus of corpses where the blood had pooled. The lead one opened its mouth, a harsh, hissing scream coming from it, and the Corrector saw a ruin of bleeding gums and crooked teeth.

Herald fired. The flechette broke the sound barrier, the shell passing through the screaming man and blasting fragments of his body backward in a shower of red. The shockwave knocked over the woman immediately behind him. The Herald System’s muzzle compensated, pointed downward, and fired again. The effect on her body was like a pulped water balloon as a red spray exploded backward across the decking.

The second woman stagger-stumbled in the gore, and Herald fired again, tearing her torso in half. Her legs slopped bonelessly to the decking, but her upper half appeared very much alive as it flailed toward Korvus. Herald’s fourth round hit it centre forehead, solving that problem, which left two more.

One man crouched low, his companion jinking to Korvus’s right, and unfortunately, between Korvus and the reactor’s spire. Herald couldn’t shoot him without risking damage to the reactor’s life-giving conduit.

The partial intelligence’s turret whined in frustration but found the crouching man an appropriate substitute. It spat a flechette, deleting a problem just as the last one jumped Korvus.

Korvus took two solid punches against his forearms as he raised his hands in guard. This thing hits hard. Korvus ducked under a third swing, then rose into an uppercut, his augmented strength knocking the crazed man clear off his feet. His opponent landed on his back, the metal decking clanking in sympathy.

HERALD:||Toss him over there. I need a clear shot.

A marker landed on Korvus’s overlay.

No. We need evidence, not more hamburger.||:KORVUS

The man scrambled to his feet in time to get a punch to his head from Korvus’s armoured fist. He fell back, but not bonelessly. Momentum and force said he had to go down, but he came right back up again.

Korvus was surprised, but not so surprised he didn’t hit the guy three more times. On the third strike, the man’s neck broke, and he sagged bonelessly to the decking, his eyes glazing as the life leaked out.

Status.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||No targets recognised. Clear.

Korvus bent by the one whose neck he’d broken, turning the man over. His whole body was mottled with the same bruising evident on his face.

He looks… dead.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||You literally punched the life out of him.

I mean, before that. See the bruising?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Scanning. Stand by.

The Herald System’s armour contained an array of active and passive sensors. It went to town on the active scans, bombarding the corpse at Korvus’s feet with LIDAR and RADAR.

While the machine processed the scan, Korvus looked around the room, then headed toward the equipment rack the five had emerged from behind. At the end of a long line of shelving, he found another sticky, slick patch on the metal floor, the slime trail leading toward another vent.

I don’t like this.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||While you’re in a bad news frame of mind, here’s some more. My best estimate puts that body as deceased prior to… well, you know. Lividity onset is usually visible within thirty to one hundred and twenty minutes, but for it to be that pronounced suggests he was dead for six or more hours.

He didn’t act like a man dead for six hours.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Right?? But I haven’t finished. Fatal hyperthermia occurs when you squishy, feeble humans reach a core temperature of around 44℃. At 60℃, a human body would experience immediate, massive protein denaturation. A person would not survive even briefly at this temperature. And he was that temperature the whole way through, not just crispy on the outside.

Protein denaturation?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Right, you’re not in the sciences. It’s bad, okay? Except, in this case, clearly not. He didn’t look like he found it fatally bad, until he introduced himself to you.

Herald, what kind of psychotropic fever would cause this?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||There is no possible way a fever could cause this. The host would die before reaching this state. Thirty seconds of this core temperature would provide intense pain and confusion to the victim. After a minute, complete loss of brain function would occur. While my visual recording shows vapour escaping from parts of his skin, perhaps relating to, say, his blood cooking, he shouldn’t have been walking, let alone running and fighting. He should have been very dead, very quickly.

A gleam caught Korvus’s eye. He followed the wall, arriving at a jacket. He lifted it, finding it tacky with blood and the viscous fluid. It was station-issue gear, and he carefully shook it out until he could see the name on the back. Cooke.

Herald, find me Cooke’s details from the prison’s systems.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Ahead of you, boss. It was the first guy I shot.

Where was he six hours ago?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Standard security footage puts him lunching with friends.

Did he look like his blood was boiling then?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||No. Here, look. He seems fine, if you don’t look closely. Zoom the view into his eyes.

A still from the recording landed on Korvus’s overlay. He saw the sunken look to Cooke’s eyes, like the man hadn’t slept in a year.

HERALD:||Ask me where he was forty-eight hours ago.

No.||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Did you lose your sense of wonder?

I know where he was. He was in the sickbay, wasn’t he?||:KORVUS

HERALD:||Now who’s mind-reading?

Korvus dropped the jacket. It was time to have another conversation with Dr. Aris.

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