by Terry Mixon
“Greetings, humans,” an artificial voice said from the speakers over their heads. “Welcome to your doom.”
24
Elise tried to wrap her brain around what Carl had just told her. “What do you mean, I have alien nanites in my body? What are they doing? Are the babies safe?”
This was her greatest fear. Her unborn children were at risk because of something that she couldn’t understand or control. Were these alien devices going to kill them? Or maybe something worse. She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind that there might be worse things in the universe than becoming a Pale One.
Carl shrugged slightly. “I’ve extracted a couple, and I’m working on figuring out how they work and what their purpose is, but I’m not sure how readily they’re going to give up their secrets.
“What I can tell you is that they don’t seem to be doing anything harmful. They’re not acting like medical nanites, so they’re not changing any of your cells.
“They’re similar to the nanites that we recovered from the velociraptors that Talbot collected. In fact, they’re physically identical, but these don’t seem to be designed to keep you from evolving.
“Even if they were, it isn’t like you’d care that it keeps different mutations from passing on to your offspring. That kind of manipulation is very subtle and doesn’t hurt the individuals involved, only affecting the species over extremely long periods of time.”
“That’s not reassuring,” she said flatly. “I think I need to talk with Lily and make absolutely certain that the babies are safe. It’s time to extract them and put them into gestation pods. Once that’s done, you’re going to be able to screen all of these alien things out of their bodies, right?”
“It should be possible, but until I actually try, I’m not going to know for sure. I don’t want to give you false hope. Also, you’ve got smaller machines—picotech—inside your body. They’re much smaller than nanites, and I have even less idea what they’re doing.
“In fact, they’re not only in your body but also in the air around us. Why it would behoove the alien devices to fly around you, I’m not certain. It may very well have something to do with the way the robot was able to override our locks.
“The medical nanites that were already in your system have been compromised, but only to the point where they ignore the alien nanites. None of their other functions have changed. That looks like a protective measure that the alien tech implemented to protect itself.”
She started to say something, but he held up a hand.
“I’m going to do absolutely everything I can to make sure that you’re safe and reverse whatever’s happening, but I’m picking up hints that there are even smaller devices than the picotech involved. Femtotech. They’re as much smaller than the picotech as those are from the nanotech.
“Nanotech is basically doing things with complete atoms. Picotech can work with the different pieces of atoms, like manipulating electrons and protons. Basically, you can remake matter with that kind of thing. Or potentially unmake it. Femtotech is playing around with the energy states in individual atomic nuclei.
“I suspect a combination of all three of those are responsible for those doors that appear and disappear at a moment’s notice. Basically, these little devices are disassembling the solid matter and changing it into something like the air around us. When they rebuild the doors, they transform the molecules in the air directly into solid matter. Or they’re moving the surrounding stone to create the doors.”
She shook her head. “That’s not science, Carl. That’s magic. I can’t even begin to imagine what the implications of something like that might be, but it’s going to change literally everything.
“The problem is that I don’t want to personally be part of that revolution in understanding. I want these things out of my body, and I want them out of my children. If they can take things apart, they’re a threat to anything and everyone around me. I can wave my hand and accidentally make the hull disappear. Or you. How far around me are they?”
“About fifteen meters, and there aren’t enough of the alien devices present to disassemble much. I suspect the chamber below—perhaps even the entire obelisk—is crawling with these devices. Hell, they might make up the majority of what we saw down there.”
He started to say something else but hesitated.
She grimaced and gestured for him to continue. “Whatever you’re thinking, trot it out. I don’t care if you know whether it’s true or not. If you suspect something, I want to hear it.”
Her young friend sighed and looked down. “I think those small chambers that we used to travel to the other planet disassembled us. I don’t think we went anywhere physically. I think they scanned us down to the subatomic level and then sent the information to the other end for reassembly via FTL.”
Elise tried to say something, but even though her mouth was moving, she had no idea what words she was trying to form. That was… insane.
No. It was worse than insane. It was terrifying.
“Are you telling me that that machine down there killed us and built copies at the other end?” she asked slowly. “And then when we came back, it did it all over again? That we’re not the same people that went down to the planet?”
Carl hesitantly nodded. “Obviously, it’s not making much of a difference in how we see ourselves. If they scanned us with that level of resolution, then they captured everything that makes us us.
“The only thing I can’t speak for is the spiritual aspect. Personally, I’m not an overly religious person, but I think it’s evident that someone who’s more devout is going to be concerned that they’re not the same person as they were before.
“I can’t make that kind of judgment call for anyone else, but I choose to believe that if the machines were capable of making a good enough copy for us to not know the difference, what makes our spiritual selves would have been propagated as well. Sadly, I can see where others might not agree.”
The thought of that made her head spin. The implications of what he was suggesting would be… profound.
“You need to keep that information to yourself,” she said in a low voice. “We’re going to brief my husband, Kelsey, Talbot, Olivia, Sean, and Marcus, but I don’t want any word of this going further, because it could have severe political implications. Is that clear?”
“I’ll need to tell Ralph and Austin. They’re my right hands, and I’ll need their help to unravel this.”
“Fine, but no one else, and they have to be sworn to secrecy,” she said as she stared into his eyes. “If this gets out, it could upset the inheritance of the Pentagaran throne. I’m not saying that you have to suppress your research, but we need to keep it exceptionally close to the vest.
“At this point, you need to focus on understanding what happened to us. That means we’re going to have to come back here at some point and explore this planet in more detail and try to understand the technology better.
“Perhaps examining the robot will give you more to work with. You need to finish collecting the alien nanites, or whatever you call them. Meanwhile, I’m going to have Lily move my children into gestation pods, and I want you to make certain that they’re free and clear of all alien infestation. Understood?”
“I’ll do my very best.”
She knew that he would, but sadly, a person’s best wasn’t always good enough. This really felt like it was going to be one of those times. She wasn’t looking forward to telling Jared any of this, but he had to know.
It was her fault that she’d involved herself in this, and now she was paying the price. She only hoped that her children would be spared.
Jared watched the data firming up on the Clan forces as Persephone moved into the retrieval zone. They’d broken through at the flip point, and while it looked like they were taking a beating, a large task force had escaped the engagement and was on its way toward the science station and its defenders.
“What kind of time frame are we l
ooking at before they’re in range to detect the pinnaces leaving?” he asked the helmsman.
Thompson tapped a few buttons on his console and turned to face him. “That depends on how soon our people get moving. If they can get out of there in the next hour, there’s virtually no chance that the Clan vessels will detect them. If they take half an hour more, the potential for detection rises almost to the level of certainty.”
“What about the defensive forces around the station?” Julia asked from where she leaned against the bulkhead at the back of the bridge.
“They’re going to slow the Clans down, but not enough to matter. The forces fighting at the flip point will break through shortly, so there’ll be a second wave. If anybody in the first wave spots the pinnaces, it’s only going to take one com signal for them to pass that information along.”
“Let’s take a look at the composition of what’s made it into the system so far,” Jared said. “Throw everything up onto the main screen, and send it to our implants as well.”
It only took a few moments for the data on the attacking ships to appear in his implants, and he could see right away that the lead force was made up entirely of destroyers. Those weren’t going to be able to break through the defensive perimeter around the science station.
Unfortunately, they’d be more than capable of seeing everything in the area and sending the data back to the ships behind them.
The tally of vessels coming through the flip point and engaging the defenses was growing with every second. Everything from cruisers up to superdreadnoughts. He hadn’t believed that the Clans had had that kind of force available, but he’d been wrong. They’d obviously been preparing long and hard for this fight.
Or the Singularity had gone out of their way to provide more than enough construction slips for them to build this attack force. Jared had no doubt that when the time for treachery was at hand, the Singularity would turn these ships against their masters. Once the Clan had done the work of fighting the AIs for them, the Singularity would waltz in and simply take over.
After all, hadn’t that been their plan all along? This was the goal they’d been working toward since before they’d subverted the AIs in the first place. They were on the cusp of achieving their long-term goals and ruling humanity with what he had no doubt would be an iron fist.
If Kelsey managed to stop the AIs, the New Terran Empire would still have to deal with the Clans and the Singularity while those organizations vied for control of what was left of the Rebel Empire. It was going to be ugly no matter how this turned out, but at least the two combatants were made up of human beings.
Talbot came through the hatch and took in what was happening. “Looks like the balloon has gone up. I was just down checking on the equipment that we have left, and I can take about a squad’s worth of the crew and equip them in the spare armor if we can get a pinnace. That might allow us to intervene if it looks like Kelsey needs someone to pull her out of the fire.”
Jared shook his head. “While I’ve moved the fleet into a position to fight, a rescue mission just gives the Clans one more chance to detect us. If Kelsey is late getting away, we’ll use the fleet to defend them until we can get them back on board. A pinnace isn’t going to do you any good in the fighting around the station. There are too many Clan ships to launch a rescue operation at this point. I’m sorry.”
He could see Talbot’s teeth clenching, and he understood what the man was feeling. He wasn’t happy about leaving his sister there either. He was particularly unhappy, considering how she’d tricked him.
It had to be far worse for her husband. Talbot hadn’t even known that she was pregnant. When she got back, Jared had no doubt that the big Marine Raider would tear a strip off his wife. As a former marine noncommissioned officer, Talbot had a command of Standard that was unparalleled when it came to chewing ass.
He hoped that his brother-in-law had a chance to use it.
25
Carl waited in the corridor as Lily did her work on Elise in the medical center, transferring her unborn children into gestation pods. While the doctor worked, he focused on going through what his instruments had told him about the alien devices.
He couldn’t get a complete read on the picotech, but the nanotech was certainly within the capability of his instruments. The devices were built differently than the Marine Raider medical nanites, which only made sense, because they’d been designed by an alien species for purposes unknown.
The one thing he knew for sure was that these devices and their smaller cousins were capable of interfacing with the Imperial nanites and changing their programming. That raised a huge question for him. How could they understand Imperial programming at all, much less in the short amount of time that had passed?
The way that they’d rewritten portions of the Imperial code indicated they had a level of understanding of what the medical nanites did, and that was frightening, considering how briefly they’d been exposed to them.
How did these alien devices function? The Raider nanites were controlled by the nanogenerator that created them and a person’s implants. The nanites themselves were incapable of independent action because they were too limited in scope individually. Making the assessment that a repair needed to be made had to be done by something with more processing power than the nanites alone possessed.
That was obviously not true of the alien devices. Particularly interesting was the fact that the picotech devices would have even less processing power than the nanites, of which there were not that many, comparatively speaking. Yet somehow, those devices were acting in concert, and something was directing them. What was it?
His scanning had detected low-level transmissions between the nanites themselves, so they were in communication with one another at the very least. Odds were good that they were also in contact with the picotech—and the femtotech, if there really were any of those mythical devices there.
Were the devices networked in such a fashion that they could mimic a machine with more capability and thus control themselves? If so, what rules were they operating under? What was their purpose?
He had to assume that the intent was to provide specific individuals access to the controls that operated the facility. If so, why did those controls still work? They were nowhere near the planet anymore.
Or did they still work? Perhaps they were nonfunctional, and all Elise could do was bring up the interface.
He’d captured some of the nanites to examine, and his borrowed equipment was in the process of doing so even now. He was going to reverse engineer them in much the same way that they’d done with the Marine Raider nanites, he suspected.
The hatch in front of him slid open, and Lily stepped out of the medical center.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Everything went perfectly,” she said with a nod and a gesture for him to proceed inside. “The children have been transferred to gestation pods, and I’m ready for you to clean this infestation out. I don’t know what these machines are supposed to be doing, but having them inside children makes my skin crawl.”
Carl could certainly understand that. He didn’t feel good about it either.
“I’m going to be using a variant of the Marine Raider nanites to capture them. The ones in Elise’s body amended the basic code inside her medical nanites to ignore them. I’m hoping that there are too few devices in the children for that.
“If I can harvest all of the nanites in them, whatever control network it has with the picotech—and hypothetically the femtotech—inside the children should fall apart.
“When that happens, they’re most likely going to go dormant and be expelled naturally from their bodies. We’ll have to keep an eye on the gestation pods themselves to make certain that the alien devices don’t modify them to create more of themselves.”
The medical center was busy with doctors and staff moving about their routine tasks. He didn’t see Elise, so she must have been in one of the private rooms close b
y. The gestation pods were sitting right there.
Lily nodded, her face grim. “That sounds very reasonable, but I want those things out of my patients. Is there any way to get them out of Elise?”
“I don’t know,” Carl admitted as he began laying out his equipment. “Since they’re not acting in a harmful manner, I’m hesitant about provoking them. With her, I recommend that we take a wait-and-see attitude.”
His answer obviously didn’t please the doctor, but she nodded. “I’m going to go check on Elise. When you’re done, come give us an update.”
Once his friend had stalked off, Carl got to work. He scanned the children and determined that the number of alien nanodevices inside them was very low. Since the children were only six weeks old, that made absolute sense. There wasn’t much mass to occupy at this point.
His scans confirmed what he’d suspected. Without Elise close by, the alien devices seemed dormant. He’d harvest the nanotech devices quickly enough. He’d also make an attempt at capturing some of the picotech for study.
He’d brought along the best gear that he could scrounge up on short notice, hoping that he might even be able to detect and scavenge some femtotech devices. He really wanted to look at those—if they existed—to see what their purpose was as well.
They’d have to make sure that Elise didn’t come close to the pods, because the devices inside her would reopen contact with any alien tech he missed until it was expelled from the children.
He also didn’t want to have the nanites around Elise modifying the gestation pods because they recognized that her children were inside. That wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
With those goals in mind, he got to work.
Kelsey grimaced. It had been a trap. One that they’d not only fallen into but one that had claimed the only override in existence. Now that she’d tripped it, they had to finish what they’d started and destroy the station and then see if they could escape with their lives.
