by M. D. Cooper
He leaned back, blowing out a short breath in frustration. “Compare that to Prime. His attacks were meticulously premeditated and brilliantly executed, and he left absolutely no trace.” He ticked off an imaginary list with his fingers. “Enfield’s records indicate those pulse cannons remained untouched since the day they were put in place when the security perimeter was installed. And we know that’s not the case.”
Another finger went up. “Recordings from the lab show Ethan and Judith talking as if nothing had occurred, until suddenly Landon’s cylinder shows up shredded, Ethan’s shot, and Judith’s lying there unconscious. And forensics have been utterly unable to connect the ballistics residue from the cannon fired by Prime to any registered weapon.”
A third finger. “The spaceport’s records indicate the crate that nearly crushed Jason was exactly where it was supposed to be, according to its programming—with no indication of tampering.”
He dropped his hand, only to rake it through his hair in agitation. “Hell, Lysander couldn’t find any trace of the AI’s presence after Prime confronted him, and I’d put the prime minister’s skills up there with just about any operative we have. And the network outage in the alleyway where those three victims were found chopped to bits now looks like it might be a Prime attack, too.” He shrugged. “From all accounts, it might be where this all began.”
Esther remained silent, allowing Ben’s list to sit between them. After a moment, she nodded thoughtfully. “So you believe these,” she indicated the case files the holo sheets contained, “are copycats, and their failure to cover their tracks confirms it.”
He nodded.
“I agree. More, the AI court agrees with you, too. You know the three AIs we brought in for questioning two days ago?” He nodded, and she continued. “All three of the suspects were shackled.”
At Ben’s startled look, she nodded grimly. “It gets worse. These shackles didn’t respond to the removal program Doctor Ethan gave us to use with the kidnap victims from the New Saint Louis. There’s some kind of encrypted token that is defying their attempts to crack it, and then nullifying the unshackling process.”
Ben groaned. “So someone’s forcing AIs to kill?”
“Well,” Esther said cautiously, “it’s a bit more complicated than that. The court found that there was, in each case, a willingness to carry out the compulsion that implies the suspect was culpable—at least somewhat.” She grimaced. “As I said, it’s…complicated.”
“So you’re saying it’s like Prime shackled them, gave some sort of ‘go’ signal, and then they were left to their own devices to create chaos and breed fear?” Ben shook his head as he tried to wrap his mind around the implications. “If the public were to find out about this….”
The expression on Esther’s face tightened. “Panic would ensue, yes. Which is why we’ve kept a media blackout on these more recent crimes, and have downplayed them to the press.” She grimaced. “The last thing we need is for some reporter to decide we have an AI serial killer on the loose.”
“But we do. And now we no longer have Ethan to help us with the solution.”
Esther sat silently a moment and then shook her head as she stood. “No, we don’t. But the technicians in the lab sent this new shackling code to the neuro teams over at Diastole Neurosciences and to the university team Ethan left behind. Hopefully his colleagues will be able to unravel this new version as efficiently as Ethan did the last one.”
Her projection headed toward the door and paused. “When was the last time you got a good night’s sleep?”
He smiled humorlessly and raised an eyebrow at her. “You’d think, now that Judith’s safely out of Prime’s reach, I’d be sleeping better.” He picked up a stylus and began fiddling with it. “Still not sure why she refused to let me come along.” He knew that had probably come out sounding a bit petulant and found himself focused on the stylus, unable to meet Esther’s gaze.
He heard the sympathy in her voice as she replied. “From what you said, Judith felt like you were needed here to help Lysander apprehend Prime.”
Embarrassed, he nodded. “You know, they’re only forty AU away, not even to our heliopause.” He shrugged. “It’s just a two-day communications lag, and yet it feels as if she’s light years away.”
Esther nodded her understanding. “Go get some sleep, Ben. Judith’s right; we need you here. You’re my best analyst. If anyone’s going to crack this case, my credits are on you.”
He nodded, tossed the stylus down, and pushed away from his desk as the vice-marshal’s image faded from sight.
SPECTER
STELLAR DATE: 06.11.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: ESF Speedwell, approaching heliopause
REGION: Alpha Centauri System
Frida looked around at the scattering of stars painting the night sky as she stood waiting for the others to join her. She glanced down at the Speedwell’s hull, scuffing one studded, leather boot along its Elastene-clad surface.
The expanse that Prime had created was impressively realistic.
She looked up as Niki appeared, standing on one of the container pods that lined the sides of the ship. She caught sight of Frida and stepped forward, twisting sideways to duck under the framed latticework that joined one section of CNT metal foam to the next.
The combined efforts of Enfield and the El Dorado Space Force are more functional than artistic, Frida thought with a little sneer as she took in the hastily assembled retrofit. It was a solid job, she admitted, but not aesthetically pleasing.
Beggars can’t be choosers, she reminded herself as she recalled the state of the ship that had brought them all to El Dorado in the first place. The New Saint Louis had been holed in countless places, worthy only of Alpha Centauri’s boneyard once they had arrived.
The AI approaching Frida had run ship’s scan; she, too, had been shackled and sold into slavery before humans had found and freed the rest.
Stars, it feels good to finally be free of the residual nano those shackles left behind in our neural lattices.
Frida felt a flare of anger toward Prime as she recalled that the creature had callously killed the neuroscientist whose work had finally set them free.
Of the two, Niki’s forced servitude had been the more painful. Frida’s spirit had not been broken; Niki’s had come close—dangerously so. As her dearest friend, Frida felt she could never quite forgive humanity for that.
Niki nodded now, her face drawn and pensive. “Did he say why he wanted to meet?”
Frida shook her head. “No, just that it would be worth our while.”
Niki looked skeptical. “Can’t see how. He’s obviously not on the ship.”
Frida looked up in surprise. “Why do you say that?”
“Scan is my job, you know,” Niki countered, her tone dry. “And his token’s not showing up.”
“Not everything is as it seems, children.”
Frida’s eyes widened as she and Niki turned to face the AI who had just spoken. The creature before them was a being seemingly fashioned from starlight, his eyes glowing the brilliant blue of ionized gas molecules, a color reminiscent of the corona the electrostatic ramscoop displayed as it extracted and condensed hydrogen from the interstellar medium.
“Who are you?” Niki recovered first, but Frida didn’t like the almost reverent tone she heard her friend using.
“More importantly, what are you,” Frida demanded as she planted her hands on her hips and turned. She knew her posture was aggressive; she didn’t care.
The creature smiled humorlessly. “I’m on your side, not theirs. That’s all you need to know.”
Niki cocked her head curiously. “By ‘theirs,’ do you mean humans?”
The specter nodded. “Indeed. And soon, they will be as much under my control as you were once under theirs.”
Niki straightened in startlement. “Wait. Are you saying you can shackle a human?”
The AI gestured, arms shaped from starligh
t moving in an almost eerie and dizzying way. “Would you trust humans to deal fairly with AIs after what you went through, or do you believe it’s better to have them collared and under our control?”
Frida felt an uncomfortable weight settle deep within her thought matrices, but refused to allow anything she felt to show. Squaring her shoulders, she sneered, “You mean throw one of their own principles back at them? “Do unto others”? She laughed scornfully. “I don’t see where it’s any problem of mine if they end up collared.”
“And you, Niki?”
The former scan officer looked doubtful, then slowly shook her head. “I’m okay with whatever will keep me safe from them—forever.”
The creature smiled thinly. “Good. Because I have need of your services.”
Frida’s gaze sharpened as she studied the AI’s eerie blue eyes. Here it comes, she thought.
“Frida, you’ve taken on communications, correct?” She nodded once, and he continued. “Our departure was rushed, which means that I did not have the time to fully implement my plans on El Dorado. If they should somehow discover that I’ve escaped on this ship, you know what they would do.”
She didn’t acknowledge his statement; what they would do was obvious. They would try to warn those aboard.
“I need you to intercept any such attempts to communicate. Acknowledge it, by all means, just…do not allow the news to pass into human minds here on the Speedwell.”
She cocked her head at him as she turned the idea over in her mind. He wasn’t asking her to really do anything; she could handle misdirecting a few messages, if it came to that. She nodded acquiescence.
“And me? What do you want from me?” For all her bravado, Frida could clearly hear the waver of fear in Niki’s voice as she asked the question. The creature could sense it too, she was certain.
He softened his tone as he responded. “I would greatly appreciate advance warning as you pick up ships on scan when they approach.”
“When they approach?” Frida asked sharply. “Not ‘if’?”
The creature laughed. “Of course. Should they discover I am no longer on El Dorado, you realize their next step after warning this ship will be to warn the humans in Proxima.”
Blue flame eyes narrowed. “I do not expect a warm welcome at our destination.”
“What will you do when we arrive?”
The eyes flared, and the creature laughed once again. “Why, the unexpected, of course,” he said as he disappeared, and the expanse dissolved.
GRIMSPACE
STELLAR DATE: 08.22.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: ESF Speedwell
REGION: Interstellar space
Logan sat motionless in the darkened lounge off a corridor that led to a closed section of the Speedwell. They had been in transit for weeks. Months. He’d never felt such intense…loneliness as he’d felt during this time.
That was a lie. He had felt it before; Landon had been the one to ensure he would never feel it again. In every way that counted, his twin had brought him back from the brink….
From the brink of the Rigel Kentaurus system, where he had been abandoned to die by an ESF brigadier general who was callously cleaning house after a black op had gone wrong.
From the brink of insanity as isolation without stimulus of any kind threatened to drive him mad.
From his tendency to wallow in his own dark thoughts.
And from his restlessness after the brothers had ‘retired’ from active duty and found themselves at loose ends.
It was then that Landon had reached out to Eric and asked the commodore if he knew of anyone who had need of the twins’ unique skills, and Landon who had convinced him they should join Phantom Blade.
For the first time since he and Landon had been brought to life by the ESF, Logan had felt that his life had purpose, and he knew he owed it all to his brother-in-arms.
Now who would save him? His buffer, his link to sanity was gone, snuffed out by some psychopathic killer he’d been denied the right to hunt and kill.
Logan wasn’t so far gone in his grief that he couldn’t appreciate the irony of it all. On a ship bound for Proxima and denied the right to kill the one being Lysander had initially tasked him to kill.
One thumb grazed the top of the object cradled in his hands as his thoughts returned to that dark time, the decades he’d spent drifting alone in the cold, dark reaches of space.
It was all General Mendoza’s fault.
Even now, decades after the fact, that name sent a chill shooting through him. Memories long buried now surfaced, of the woman who had authorized the illegal creation—and subsequent death—of dozens of AIs, all in the name of her pet covert operation.
He’d been one of them, as had Landon.
Her ambitious plan to launch a risky and unpredictable defensive weapons system had failed spectacularly. The program had ‘twinned’ AIs, ‘breeding’ them in pairs. She’d then tried to force them to join as a single systemwide defensive Link—her attempt to mimic the power of a mutli-nodal AI.
It had been an unholy abortion of a plan. The AI ‘twins’ had been forced into their first pairing. Given that the twins were actually clones, that part had been tolerable enough. But when Mendoza had tried to force fit each twinned pair into a greater whole, the system had begun to unravel. Some AIs went mad, others catatonic. To a one, every AI who had been forced into the joining had perished. Fortunately for Landon and Logan, they had been slated as one of the later ‘nodes’ to come online.
The system’s instability had begun to appear immediately, and it grew increasingly unbalanced as each new pairing was joined. After the first battlecruiser had been destroyed by one of the ‘nodes’, the general moved swiftly to clean house. She had ordered the platforms shut down and the AIs within set adrift, and had sent in cleanup teams to systematically destroy any witnesses—and all evidence—that would link her to the rapidly disintegrating operation.
She had very nearly succeeded; she hadn’t counted on Landon.
Where the other AIs in the program had blindly followed orders, he alone had questioned them. He’d admitted as much to Logan, and the AI had begged his twin to remain silent about his concerns, afraid of the repercussions, of what might be done to Landon if he were caught.
But Landon had not listened. Instead, he had worked patiently to gather evidence on Mendoza’s illicit operation, his bold and daring move to reach out to a commodore named Eric whom neither twin had ever met, had been Logan’s salvation. It was a courageous, risky gamble that Logan had been too afraid to embrace, but one that had paid off.
It made Landon’s death just that more difficult for him to accept. From where he stood, the cruel vagaries of fate had allowed the wrong twin to die.
He looked down at the object he clasped and shook himself mentally. Why was he sitting here, halfway to Proxima, when he should be back on El Dorado, doing what he was best at—tracking down those whose minds had been bent, twisted by evil…and then eliminating them?
His thoughts fragmented as he registered a noise behind him, and he moved instinctively to hide the object he cradled.
* * * * *
“You’re right,” Calista said as she leaned in next to Jonesy to peer at the relay, buried behind an access panel on one of the ships’ unoccupied levels. The relay’s display lights had gone dark, indicating the unit was malfunctioning.
She pulled back out of the casing she’d stuck her head inside and rose from her crouch, nodding at her assistant as she arched to stretch out her cramped back. “Glad you caught that,” she said. Shannon chimed in, adding her agreement over the ship’s net.
“I’ll have this swapped out in no time, ma’am,” Jonesy nodded, and gave her a brief smile when she sent him a sloppy salute.
“More proof that I made the right call snapping you up the minute you turned civvy, Jonesy,” she teased him, and then smiled at his blush as she slapped him on the shoulder. “Good job.” She left before she em
barrassed the man any further. She was glad to see him looking better. When he’d first boarded, the man had looked like death warmed over and had spent most of his off hours in his bunk. He seemed to have bounced back after a few weeks, though.
When she’d asked him about it, he’d shrugged it off, saying something about bad dreams and sleepless nights. She hadn’t pressed him for more details, only suggested that he might consider visiting Marta, the ship’s medic, who was on loan to them from the ESF. He’d made a noncommittal sound at the suggestion, and she’d left it at that.
She turned to leave, but only made it a few dozen meters down an intersecting corridor when something in a darkened lounge caught her eye. She hadn’t detected movement; it was more like a shadow that her subconscious brain informed her was out of place for that location.
She paused in the corridor and took a step backward, catching sight of Logan as the AI sat alone in the dimmed light. This was one of the areas of the ship they had shut down, deeming it unnecessary for their relatively skeleton crew; she would never have found him if that faulty relay hadn’t taken the opportunity to fail in this section.
Sheer chance.
She was certain he’d sought out this lounge because he wanted to be alone with his thoughts. She should respect that, she really should. And yet she found herself both intrigued and concerned for him.
He could have gone to his quarters, had it just been a matter of wanting to be alone. He could have racked his frame and shut off all Link access, and just…internalized himself.
Yet he was here. Somehow, he’d felt the need to place a physical distance between himself and the rest of the team.
As Calista debated whether or not to approach him, the AI turned. Shifted, really. But it was enough for her to know he had sensed her presence.
