Star Destroyers

by Tony Daniel

  “You found a ship eleven kilometers long!” Topelius said. “Didn’t you think that was special enough to report directly to Commonwealth City?”

  “On the long axis,” Balthus said, sounding as though the distinction mattered—which of course it did to him. “On the short dimension it’s about seven.”

  Rice adjusted her projector, shrinking down the viewpoint so that the tiny bead of the Survey vessel—which carried a team of ninety-odd comfortably—could be seen floating beside one of the alien vessel’s open hatches. “Much larger than the Shield of Justice,” Rice said in a gloating tone.

  Kearney hoped his mental wince didn’t reach the muscles of his face, but he couldn’t swear to that. Bloody Hell, Rosie, do you want to go straight from here to a prison that doesn’t show up in anybody’s records?

  Shawm said in a perfectly flat voice, “What do you know about the Shield of Justice?”

  Shawm was a tall, rangy man with an extremely dark complexion. He wore a khaki second-class uniform with no medals or rank indications. He was probably a general, but Kearney wasn’t sure that they used familiar ranks in Security.

  “Only what’s public knowledge in any spaceport in the Commonwealth!” Kearney broke in. “Isn’t that right, Doctor Rice? Nothing that big could be truly secret, after all.”

  He was desperately afraid that Rosie was going to start projecting images of the Commonwealth’s supership—a sphere a kilometer in diameter—if he didn’t head her off.

  Yes, of course the Shield was classified as Most Secret—but they were Surveyors, for God’s sake! They were trained to learn things, and the alien environments that Surveyors examined as their job were a lot more puzzling than any human riddle could be.

  “Yes,” said Balthus, blindsiding Kearney. “It’s being built on Ferrol and seems to have absorbed half the Defense budget for each of the past ten years. That’s figuring the real cost of items listed in the public budget, of course. The costs’re remarkably inflated in the published material, but real information is easy to find.”

  “I think we should leave this subject,” said Shawm, after a pause during which Kearney had held his breath.

  “Yes,” said Kearney. “As I say, we reported the find to a Defense facility and got on with our survey. There didn’t appear to be any particular urgency about the matter.”

  “No urgency!” said Blumenthal. “Do you claim you’re ignorant of the current political situation?”

  “Well sir,” Kearney said. “Things are tense between the Commonwealth—”

  As he spoke he realized he should have said “us,” but he found it very hard to imagine a community between his team and the group at the table opposite.

  “—and the Empire of Khorsabad, but—”

  “Khorsabad might want to attack before your Shield of Justice—” Balthus began.

  “Doctor Balthus!” said Kearney. “We were politely asked to avoid that subject!”

  Rice said, “Yeah, you’ve pretty much forced Khorsabad to attack while it still has a chance to win.” It’s like having two dogs on long leashes who decided to start running in opposite circles!

  Graz, the stocky woman with the Production portfolio, chuckled like gravel in a chute. “It’s too late for Khorsabad now. When the final software checks are done—and that could be any moment!—the Shield is done, and the Commonwealth’s enemies are done.”

  Hoping to change the subject, to bring it back on track, Kearney said, “But the ship we found couldn’t have any contemporary importance. We believe it was in sponge space for thirty thousand years. Only when its fusion bottle depowered completely did it drop into normal space to be found.”

  “Good God!” said Blumenthal. “This ship is thirty thousand years old?”

  “Older than that,” Kearney said. He was the team’s head of engineering, as well as being the captain and navigator of the survey vessel. A long time ago he’d been a naval lieutenant, but the Survey Section had been a better fit for him. “That’s the probable lifetime of a fusion bottle the size of the one powering the artifact.”

  Kearney coughed for a pause. “Based on the star charts on the artifact, though,” he said, “the real age is probably closer to a half million years. So it didn’t occur to us that it had any bearing on present events.”

  “It’s been orbiting a gas giant in the Brotherhood system for as far back as the original catalogue,” Balthus said. “It was simply assumed to be a natural satellite until a miner landed on it eighteen months ago and found open hatches. Then we were called in.”

  “If you have the ship’s star charts,” said Blumenthal carefully, “then you must have entered the ship’s computer?”

  Rice nodded and said, “We’ve accessed portions of the ship’s . . . well, I’ll call it a computer for want of a better word. Controlling intelligence. We’ve limited our explorations to discrete sectors of the complex, avoiding any attempt to bring the full system on line.”

  “Our experts will be able to do that,” said Tadeko, Advanced Projects. “We’ll want a full report on your operations. You’ll arrange for that to be sent over immediately.”

  He wasn’t making a suggestion or even giving an order; he was stating an immutable fact. Tadeko was by far the oldest person in the room. He made Kearney think of a wise old lizard. A poisonous lizard.

  “I don’t doubt that you’ll be able to do that, if you wish to,” said Rice, meeting Tadeko’s eyes squarely. “And I’ll certainly meet with your specialists if you like.”

  “Look, if this is a warship,” said Admiral Blumenthal, “what sort of weaponry does it have? Because advanced armaments certainly might have bearing on our operations in the near future.”

  “Not the near future,” Kearney said. “Their principle is so different from anything in our arsenal that it took us the better part of a year to realize that we were looking at weapons.”

  “We had to get into the ship’s controlling intelligence to see the connection,” Rice said. Without being asked, she brought up images of the alien vessel’s interior. The four spherical projectors filled the volume, each connected to the exterior hull by four struts.

  “So that you understand the scale . . . ,” Rice said. She focused down on one of the bodies lying at the base of a strut, then expanded again to the rank of multikilometer spheres filling the huge ship. “Initially we assumed that we were looking at parts of the propulsion system that we didn’t understand.”

  “We’ve been calling them projectors,” said Kearney, “but that’s not really correct. They seem to be quantum devices which cause objects to be in the center of the target. There’s no movement, just a different location.”

  “Do they throw explosives, then?” Blumenthal said, frowning. “How big are the projectiles?”

  Before Kearney could speak, Tadeko looked at his fellow and said, “That’s immaterial. The location is already occupied by matter—even in deep space. There would be a total conversion of mass into energy. Total. The result would destroy any object of human scale.”

  Tadeko’s voice sounded like scales rasping. Though he hadn’t said so, Kearney was sure that he realized that such devices would be just as effective on planets. Unless they were very slow to aim and load, or were very unreliable, four projectors seemed—literally—overkill.

  “What’s the range, then?” said Graz. She spoke relatively softly. The board members had lost the angry tone and expressions that they’d begun the briefing with.

  “It should be infinite,” Kearney said. “It’s a quantum effect, after all, not Newtonian. Though of course we haven’t tried to activate the devices.”

  “I’d like to go back to where you showed us the scale,” said Topelius. “I thought I saw a body. Was that a body?”

  Rice obligingly shrank the focus to the dead crewman that she’d used to demonstrate how large the projectors were. The team had left the bodies where they were, pretty much. They’d moved the few who’d been in the way, and Balthus a
nd his team had processed a number when they studied them; but all told, those were only drops in a bucket.

  “These individuals run between forty and fifty kilos each,” Balthus said with proprietary enthusiasm. “There are two sexes present, but I suspect from imagery in the databases that there was a third sex also—the one that does the actual breeding. Those were much larger; four or five hundred kilos, on my estimate.”

  “Good God!” Blumenthal repeated. “How many bodies are there?”

  “And how did they die?” said Shawm. There was a hint of tension in his voice, quite different from the flat, threatening tone he’d used before.

  “Nine hundred and seventy-three,” said Balthus. He was noticeably more alert now that the discussion was on his specialty. He’d been used to leading briefings; most Survey reports focused on biology. Engineering and information technology were merely tools that supported the biological studies which determined whether or not a new world was suitable for human settlement. “And as for how they died—”

  The close up of the corpse was strikingly ugly, but death generally was. The aliens hadn’t worn clothing, but the fine fur that covered their bodies had fallen out over the millennia. It formed delicate halos on the plating beneath the bodies.

  The naked corpses—this one was typical—had shrunk as their tendons dried and tightened. There had been no decay in vacuum, but over such a long time the surfaces had sublimed except where the bodies were in relatively restricted volumes.

  “—most of them died when the ship depressurized suddenly. There were a few in atmosphere suits at the time. I’ll show you those in a moment.”

  The creatures’ faces thrust forward more than humans’ did and were generally narrower. Rice’s software created images of the creatures as they’d been in life; she now inset those into the central display. With fur in place they were more bestial—and therefore less ugly, because they no longer looked like deformed humans.

  “What’s the name of the people?” Topelius said. “The race who built it, I mean?”

  “We have no idea,” said Balthus tartly. “I suppose some day we might be able to understand their spoken language, though I don’t see that there’s any reason we’d want to. The race doesn’t appear to have survived the loss of this warship for very long.”

  “When this ship vanished, their enemies—another race—made a complete sweep of them,” Rice said.

  “That race is gone by now also, but much more recently,” said Balthus. “They built the lovely crystal structures which I’m sure you’ve seen.”

  “We’ve been calling them the Monkeys,” said Kearney. “We had to call them something, and ‘the corpses’ didn’t seem correct. We were more interested in what they’d been doing while they were alive, after all.”

  “The ship must have had a total systems failure,” said Blumenthal. “Was it sabotaged by their enemies, do you suppose?”

  “We’ve been bloody careful on Ferrol,” said Graz, “but Khorsabad has been trying really hard to infiltrate the dockyard. We realize it’s possible that they’ve succeeded.”

  The expression on Shawm’s face as he looked at her was that of a diner staring at half a worm in his salad. “We do not realize that,” Shawm said. “It is not possible that Khorsabad has agents on Ferrol.”

  Kearney said nothing: this was a fight in somebody else’s family. Personally, though, he hadn’t been that certain about anything since he was thirteen and stopped believing in God.

  “It wasn’t a systems failure,” Kearney said when he was sure that nobody at the Defense table was going to speak again. “And we don’t think it was sabotage in the normal sense either.”

  “Certainly not systems failure,” Balthus said. He nodded to Rice, who projected images in sequence showing half a dozen Monkeys in pale-green atmosphere suits. The chests of each body had been ripped apart, mostly by mechanical means. The exception had been burned completely through with a hole large enough to pass a man’s arm.

  “This was done by the ship’s maintenance robots,” Balthus continued. A turtle-shaped device the size of a bushel basket was in the field of some images, a few with their tri-pincered limbs extended. They looked very much like the machines which did the same job on Commonwealth warships.

  “The exception was in one of the ship’s boats,” Kearney said. “The device closest to him was configured to work on the boats and had a torch.”

  Rice expanded that image. This time the robot ran on a track in the ceiling and was almost as big as the boat it hung over.

  The termini of the robot’s arms—the hands—could rotate to bring up any one of multiple tools. Kearney knew from close examination that the one used was an oxygen lance, but he didn’t bother volunteering that to the Board. They already looked stunned.

  “It had to be sabotage,” Shawm said. “The enemy took over the central computer and did this.”

  “I think it was because of the weapons,” Rice said. “Aiming, directing, quantum weapons required a unique mechanism. The controlling intelligence had to genuinely understand the universe in realtime. This ship”—she switched to the image with which she’d begun, the prism orbiting the swirling yellow clouds of the planet below—“has true machine intelligence. It doesn’t mimic consciousness, it acts consciously.”

  “That’s the same thing,” Graz said in puzzlement. “For all practical purposes.”

  “I’d have said that those dead bodies were pretty practical!” Balthus said. Kearney didn’t remember hearing him sound snappish before.

  “To put it in other words . . . ,” Rice said. Her tone made clear the sort of words she was tempted to put it in, but thank goodness she didn’t do that. “The ship doesn’t mimic the cognition of some large sample of its creators. The ship behaves like an intelligent ship.”

  “Does your ship, your Shield,” said Balthus, “have a directive to protect itself?”

  Graz opened her mouth to reply. Before she could, Shawm broke in with, “Anything to do with such a ship as you postulate would be classified!”

  “Well, no matter,” said Rice. “I can’t imagine that you’ve created true machine intelligence.”

  “No warship would have self-preservation as its prime directive,” said Admiral Blumenthal. “That’s crazy. No matter what race built it.”

  “But a truly conscious machine wouldn’t be concerned with the priorities of the people who built it,” Balthus said. “It would have its own priorities. It’s unlikely that attacking a powerful enemy because its builders want it to would be high on the ship’s own list.”

  “Whereas hiding in sponge space as soon as it was activated would prolong the ship’s life for, well, thirty thousand years,” Rice said. “And its existence for half a million, apparently.”

  “The ship disposed of the crew as quickly and efficiently as possible,” Kearney said. “The crew members would probably have opinions of their own and might damage the ship if they were allowed to run free.”

  “Good God,” said Tadeko. “Good God.”

  He got up and ran for a door. He moved very quickly for a man of his age.

  He called something over his shoulder which Kearney heard as, “I have to send a courier!”

  Rice looked at the remaining members of the Defense Board. She said, “You don’t mean that your undoubtedly clever software engineers have managed to create real machine intelligence, do you?”

  David Drake was attending Duke University Law School when he was drafted. He served the next two years in the Army, spending 1970 as an enlisted interrogator with the 11th Armored Cavalry in Vietnam and Cambodia. Upon return he completed his law degree at Duke and was for eight years Assistant Town Attorney for Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has been a full-time freelance writer since 1981. His books include the genre-defining and bestselling Hammer’s Slammers series and the nationally bestselling RCN series, including The Road of Danger, The Sea without a Shore, Death’s Bright Day, and Though Hell Should Bar the Way.


  A SUDDEN STOP

  Steve White

  A what-if tale with a twist: set in the universe of Steve White’s upcoming novel, Her Majesty’s American, the American Revolution fizzles and now there isn’t just one sun that never sets on the British Empire, but myriad. Yet empires by their nature are at threat from separatist forces both within and without that would benefit from a Humpty-Dumpty-like Imperial crackup. Fortunately for the British Empire, there are also doughty, loyal Americans sailing mighty ships riveted together by steel and quantum uncertainty ready to ensure that the Pax Brittanica holds, even among the stars.

  “And so, on this the five hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Imperial Grand Council, it behooves us to remember that the course of history was perhaps not inevitable and foreordained, as many think. The First North American Rebellion might have shattered the Empire but for the farsighted vision of the men, on both sides of the Atlantic, who grasped the great principle of imperial federation and took the first steps on the road we are still following after half a thousand years. We have them to thank for—”

  Lieutenant Commander Jane Grenville, RSNR, flipped a switch, and the voice of Sir Archibald Ramsay, Viceroy of North America, ceased to reverberate in her earphones. The old boy wasn’t saying anything the Queen-Empress hadn’t already said in her speech from the throne. Jane settled back in her seat—one of twenty on this fairly crowded military surface-to-orbit shuttle—and tried other channels, in search of music. But on Federation Day—especially this Federation Day—it was naturally all patriotic stuff.

  Not that she, a North American with an English mother, lacked appreciation of what her ancestors on both sides had accomplished on this date in 1781 after the British crown and the Loyalist forces led by George Washington had put down Benedict Arnold and his followers who had refused to accept the settlement that had ended the rebellion almost at its inception, before it could grow into an irreconcilable, fratricidal war. It really had been a remarkably generous and large-minded settlement. Maybe old Sir Archibald, for all his fulsomeness, had a point: maybe it hadn’t had to turn out that way. It had helped that King William V had been solidly behind the settlement, in whose crafting he’d had a hand. But then, he had been a monarch of intelligence and character, as had been a number of the descendants of the heir that William of Orange and Queen Mary had unexpectedly produced shortly after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Thus it was that the Britannic Federal Empire (still so called, although its two centers of gravity now lay in the viceroyalties of North America and India) had endured and now dominated the world.