Conflict!

by Dale Moorhouse

  Ginger made a few twitches and headed for one of the ships. One of the Israeli pilots saw her coming and stepped back from the ship gesturing her to climb in. She thanked him and did just that. As she was checking out the controls, I could see them talking, then the Terran climbed in the cockpit with her taking the left seat.

  Tuxedo and I watched as they chatted about the controls and all of the instrumentation. Then they both climbed out and began slowly walking around the ship, pointing out different features to each other. Tuxedo was making like he wanted to join them, and I told him, “Let her enjoy playing with her toy and sharing it with the other kid. They are fun to watch and having the time of their lives. Let’s head for Benji’s Place and grab a few ales. She’ll catch up soon enough.”

  “Yeah, you are right. That is a huge part of her life and I won’t take her pleasure from her. I love to see her smile and hear her laugh, she does look like she is having fun does she not? She was like that when we first went aboard Thermopylae and lately she has seemed a little careworn. I’ll comm her in a while and let her know where we are. Let’s go get that, ale.”

  Sol and his former IDF buddies formed a flight school centred around the new simulators we got with our sample fighters and fighter-bombers, and he was cranking out pilots to fly our new machines. While the increase is at a moderate but steady pace, the little ships were in such demand we set up a rota so pilots could get their hours and the machines could get their service at the required intervals. We all thought the ships were ugly as sin, but the pilots loved them, to them it was like strapping engines to their arses and guns to their arms—what’s not to like?

  Sol’s last official act as our space fleet director was to promote his assistant Mordechai to fleet director. Mordechai’s first act was to make Sol wing commander of our first squadron of fighters and fighter-bombers. Sol was now qualified to fly either machine but preferred the fighter-bomber saying, “I like the feel of them in flight plus I have more guns and someone to help me shoot them.” The younger guys all go for the fighters.

  Sol, Ginger and I were reviewing the latest data brought back from Proxima, and it wasn’t good. More Plague ships had arrived and joined the main swarm which Margo reported was still headed towards Terra. The swarm had stopped accelerating and is holding a steady .2 C, which would have them approaching Terra in a little more than twenty Years. We knew they could sustain speeds higher than that and concluded they were waiting for more swarms to join them before accelerating again. Her video clips have been fed into our analysis engine and the ship count is exceeding six million ships, including a dozen more of the huge globe ships.

  Margo flew well north of the galactic ecliptic and was able to capture most of the swarm in memory before beating feet back to Mother of Glory. Analysis showed the large globe ships were fairly evenly distributed amongst the swarm, which suggested they may be more than just factory ships. Margo’s observations suggested they may also be controllers for the swarm, and if that is true, they might have a limit to how many of the lesser ships they can control.

  Ginger proposed a possible mission to disable or destroy one or more of the globes and see if it made a difference to the swarm. I liked the idea, but I also knew we didn’t have enough information about the ships in the swarm to be confident our guesses were anything more than that. I needed to fly out to Saturn Station where we dropped off the captured Plague ships and their crews when we returned from Proxima. We dropped Rusty there to aid with the research, and I was sure he had some valuable intel for us—he’s had over thirty cycles now.

  “Ginger, I’m going to Saturn Station to catch up with Rusty. Do you and Tuxedo want to come along?”

  She responded, “Yes, it will give us a chance to talk on the way. Will you bring Elaine if she is free?”

  I’d already commed Elaine, and she could go so I said, “Yes she can come. I’m going to get my armour and go-bag. Elaine will stop by to pick up hers. Sol, can you break free of your duties for a couple of cycles? I think first-hand observation of what you will be going up against would be valuable to you and your squadron. If you have a few others to bring with you, let them know now. We will be leaving at sixth deca.”

  He replied, “Yes, yes, yes, and the four of us will meet you in Hangar One at sixth deca!”

  ◆◆◆

  As soon as Righteous Claws was far enough north of the ecliptic and able to build her jump field, Missy made the jump to Saturn. Claws fell out of jump space when we hit the jump limit, and she poured on the coal from there until we were about halfway around the big planet using our gravitic drives. Then she cut power and let Saturn’s gravity slow us and warp our course until we were just outside the outer most ring and only a few thousand klicks from Saturn Station.

  We were pulling up to the hangar door when she let out a small yip, “I did it!” she exclaimed, “I broke the record by almost fifteen centas!”

  Ginger grinned and high-fived her telling the rest of us, “She and the other Swift Fang pilots have a running contest going to see who can make the transit between Terra and Saturn Station the fastest. She has just won by a healthy margin until someone figures out how she did it and then the race will be on again. Good on you, girl!”

  We disembarked the ship, and a guide showed up to take us to our accommodations, which were similar to what we had on Mother of Glory although smaller. We had a bed, a shower and most importantly, cat boxes for Serena and Edgar. I commented on this to the two cats, and Serena said, “Yes, that is nice. It is even nicer they remembered one for Shadow too.”

  “They should,” I said, “especially since I commed ahead to tell Rusty we were coming.”

  Aloud I said, “Let’s go meet Rusty and Silky and see what they have been up to.”

  When we got to Rusty’s lab, it looked like a chamber of horrors. The first impression was a maniac had been set loose with a molecular edged sword. There were Plague drone body parts on benches and shelves all around the room, and several partially disassembled Plague drones strapped to frames by a large workbench. Rusty came in from another room and said, “This isn’t what it looks like.”

  “Rusty, you don’t know how many grade B movies I’ve seen where a cheating spouse has uttered those very words when discovered by their husband or wife, so this better be good.”

  He chuckled and said, “These were truly dead from the first ship you captured. Even in death, they were valuable and we learned much, especially how to disable all of their weapons and disconnect their servo motors without destroying them. We have the ‘live’ ones next door. Come, I’ll show you.”

  He led us through a doorway. In the compartment where he had been working, we saw several bipedal forms clamped to frames in an upright position. Cables ran to each frame, and next each frame was a cart holding a laptop connected to a large monitor and a bank of storage cells. Rusty walked us around the lab and explained, “These drones’ power cells were drained by the EMP blasts used to capture the ships. As you can see they are constructed of various synthetics with metal reinforcement where needed. Some were completely encased in a ‘skin’ resembling flesh while others of the same type were not. We will have to wait until we get to the interrogation phase before we can expect an answer to why.

  “My fellow researchers and I decided to delay powering them up until we knew how they were constructed and what could be done to neutralize them without ruining their ability to communicate. That is why the mess in the other room. These creatures have all had their processors and control units disconnected from their limbs and their wireless communications and power storage modules have been removed. Each is connected to an air-gapped computer that has no wireless capability and even the external power sources are independent of the station so there can be no back-channelling through power leads. Last but not least each is fitted with a small explosive charge physically attached to their central processor and power feeds.

  “Your timing is perfect because we will be powering the
m up one-at-a-time when the other researchers get here in about ten centas. I want to advise you that there are Weasels on the team as well as Squids and Terrans.”

  “That’s fine, Rusty,” I told him, “we have been working with them on Mother of Glory too, they have contributed significantly to jump-starting the hull segment subassembly process and have supplied us with several combat capable spacecraft for test and evaluation. Part of the evaluation involves testing in combat and planning for that mission demands we know a bit more about these critters before we fly into one of their swarms and start destroying them.

  “Our intel suggests those large spherical ships may be more than factories, they may also be where the strategy and higher level tactical orders come from. If we can gain some insight from these drones, it could be beneficial.”

  Rusty grinned and said, “Yes, I kind of deduced that. Serena has been keeping me informed, and our team will do everything we can to get you the answers you need.

  “I miss working with you, Jase. I’ve enjoyed working with the team I am on, but I prefer a little less structure and a little more action. I knew what I needed to know about working with these drones cycles ago when I tore the ‘football’ apart. These are the same, just a different shape. There is too much politics and not enough action here to keep me on my game.”

  7

  “WELL, I HAVE GOOD NEWS and bad news,” Rusty announced as I walked in the door, “which do you want first?” He’d been interrogating the captured drones for the last two cycles while I met with other research teams in the three facilities we have hiding behind Saturn. Now he had some results, and I was in his lab to hear them. I could get them over my implant but I knew any traffic going over the net was monitored and I wanted to control what information got out and who got it first. I was partial to those who actually supported me, and I wanted to give it to them first and get their opinions before I ran it up the flagpole. I was dubious now about trusting the Elders.

  “Ok, Rusty let me have the bad news first,” I reply.

  “The control structure is built like their communication structure, everything flows downhill. You were right in your suspicion that the big globe ships are the top of the chain. Decisions are made there, and orders are passed to certain ships designated local controllers. The local controllers pass orders to their subordinate ships, and each ship has one or more supervisory drones. The supervisory drones then direct the drones on its ship.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” Ginger said as she looked around at the rest of us.

  “Wait,” Rusty said, “that is not all I have to say. He continued, “The supervisor's ships and supervisory drones each have a high degree of autonomy. If communications from upstream are cut off each supervising ship can carry on with its last instructions, and if the task is completed they are programmed to continue with a prime directive—search out and destroy biological life wherever they find it. This same logic carries down through the supervisory drones and ultimately, each worker drone. They all have the same primary directive.

  “We were lucky, one of the harvester ships you destroyed was a supervisory ship, and of the drones you captured, two were supervisors as well. Finding this out took time because the worker level drones don’t know which drone on the ship is the supervisor. I had to dump and interrogate several before I found one whose programming was slightly different. Even then, I needed more time to find out what the difference meant.

  “The designers were very careful, they actually designed the supervisor processors with multiple cores like we do but they also hid additional cores on some of their processors that are only activated when a particular set of instructions in the operating system runs. The instructions are written like a virus to a degree. In just three lines of code, The difference between supervisor and regular drone, a channel is built to the hidden cores, and an instruction passed to activate them. The last of the three lines destroys any reference to the hidden cores, so when the AI embedded in those cores goes active, it has no idea it was dormant. I’m not sure why the original programmers thought they needed to do that.”

  Tuxedo looked at me then turned back to Rusty and said, “Well, thank you, Mary Sunshine. I feel so much better knowing that,” he paused then gave his head a quick shake. “I apologize, Rusty, I really appreciate your work, this is definitely something I need to know. When you said bad news, I was hoping for something not quite so bad.”

  Rusty gave Tuxedo a sad smile and said, “I know Tux. Before I discovered the hidden cores, I was thinking that destroying the Plague was going to be comparatively easy. For those of you who may not understand the ramifications, the AI in the hidden cores is more sophisticated than I have ever seen. It has the capacity to direct hostilities at the same level as the globe ships and to cap that off it contains the instructions on how to build small factories to replicate more drones and eventually rebuild a swarm including a globe ship. The hunting and killing process is just delayed, not stopped.

  “I have requested Livid to come and see what I’ve found, but so far, I haven’t heard from it.”

  “Have you been able to dump the contents of the hidden cores yet?” I ask.

  “No,” Rusty answered, “I could only get in and make the discovery before the AI detected I was there and destroyed itself. The AI is gone, but it didn’t destroy its data files. I’m hoping to use a clone of one of our AIs to read the instructions and emulate the actions the original AI was likely to take. That is next, and I would like to come back to Mother of Glory to work on it.”

  “Ok, Rusty, pack up your stuff and bring whatever parts you need to continue your work at home. I’m going to need your input and advice sooner rather than later, and if you are with me, we can keep the delay to a minimum and security at its highest.” I looked around the group and said, “No discussion until we are on Claws and heading back to Mother of Glory.”

  “Silky tells me she is glad we are taking her home,” Edgar told me via implant, “she does not like it here and only has Rusty to talk to. She misses us, Jase.”

  “Thanks, Edgar, I have missed them both and will feel better when they are back home with us.”

  Serena chimed in, “Me too. They are a part of my family, and I like them close.”

  Silky never let Serena and Edgar out of her sight, and she chattered up a storm. She told Serena, “I’m afraid to walk through these rooms by myself. There is something bad here, and those things Rusty is working on are just playing dead. I tried to tell him, but he insists they are powered down. That may be, but they are not dead, and there is a big difference.”

  Serena asked her, “How do you know they are still alive, little one?”

  “Because I can hear them talking to each other. They say things like ‘wait, be patient, our time will come when we get closer to this new infection,’ and other more dire sounding things. Jase is making a mistake taking them to Mother of Glory.”

  “Edgar and I will stay with you, and you will tell us when you hear them, ok?”

  Silky smiled and responded, “I feel better already. Perhaps if we go into the lab when everyone is gone and stay really quiet, they will forget we are there and start talking.”

  Everyone had left the lab, and the three cats slunk to a corner where they couldn’t be seen by the drones to lie down and wait. It took a couple of decas before they heard the first communications between the drones. Serena touched Silky with a forepaw and signalled her to remain quiet. Edgar nodded his head at her, and the little orange cat nodded back with an expression of relief on her face.

  Serena made a few twitches and shrugs at Edgar, and he nodded and made a few twitches back, acknowledging that he was also recording what he was hearing. They lay still and recorded what sounded like a conversation between three individuals for nearly a half deca. After another deca of silence, the cats snuck out of the darkened room one-at-a-time with Serena bringing up the rear.

  They were well clear of the lab’s main hatch before Seren
a said, “Well, that was interesting. However, they are conversing seems to have a harmonic frequency our implants and collars can pick up. I suspect it is in a range beyond what Terrans and Mmrrreeowwn hear. We should find Rusty and the others and play the recordings for them.”

  The bunch of us had just finished our evening meal when the three cats come bounding into the room. Serena and Edgar came over to Elaine and me while Silky made a beeline for Rusty. I said, “We were wondering if you three had lost track of time, but I’m sure your stomach clocks told you it was meal time.”

  Serena seldom spoke aloud anymore since mastering the speech centre interface in her implant, but this time she vocalized, “We have some important news for you, and you are not going to like it. Silky made a discovery when Rusty first started working with the drones, we have been investigating what she told us and have definitive proof her fears are justified.”

  She broadcast what she recorded to all of us in the room.

  “This new race the Mmrrreeowwn have working with them must be from this star system. This must be where they developed their FTL drive. We must report this back to command as soon as we are out of this place, and our communications modules will work.”

  Another voice said, “My main comm module has been disconnected, all I have is the short range one associated with my new cores.”

  A third voice made the same statement.

  The first voice resumed, “Mine is as well, but I’ve been working on repurposing a circuit and have established communications between my short and long-range modules. This Mmrrreeowwn researcher is brilliant but no match for us. We just need to keep quiet when he and his companions are near until we are on the ship taking us in-system.”