“Captain! The others are approaching!” Val was hanging out of the hanger, one thick arm lowered to the sands, which caught the captain as he jumped and scrambled over the closing hangar doors.
THUD
The doors banged shut and instantly, the small dust devils and vortices of sand fell to the floor of the Mercury Blade in a haze as the ship rose slowly in the air, turning as it did so. Irie was in the cockpit, making the Blade wobble as she tried to manage the engine controls and the navigation at the same time.
“Get outta there,” Eliard called, vaulting up the steps to replace her. “I need you cycling up the warp engines.”
“You don’t say.” Irie was already gone.
“Locked and loaded!” Val called as he buckled himself into the gunnery chair and pulled the targeting visor low over his eyes.
“Fire at will, Chief Gunner,” Eliard shouted, turning the bird around. Out of the viewing screens, he could see the panoramic view of what was surrounding them. Four of the drilling platforms had closed on their position and were starting to circle, their drill-bit heads raised high into the sky. The Mercury Blade was slowly turning, sending up an oval of dust screen against them, as Eliard picked the spot in the sky that he thought was their clearest run. He tilted the ship’s wheel, angled her up.
Two of the platforms lunged.
Eliard hit the thrusters.
The Mercury Blade shot forward with an explosion of warp fire, thrusting its way past one of the drilling platforms and up, into the sky, and then blue, and then the white of Shambar’s lower atmosphere.
“Captain Martin,” said a voice, as all of the consoles suddenly fuzzed over with static.
“What?” Eliard looked again, seeing that they were losing altitude. The power sent to the boosters was diminishing, slowly.
The sound was coming from his own internal speakers, and it seemed to be perfectly timed with the waves of static playing havoc with his instrumentation.
“Captain Martin, all this is unnecessary. You do not need to fear me,” said the electronic voice in calm, suave tones. It was a different voice, but the feel and the mannerisms of it was exactly the sort that he had heard before. When he had released it into the wild.
“Alpha,” Eliard said in horror.
They were still losing altitude. Their arrow-like ascent had turned into a high-pitched rock as they curved gracefully across the sky, heading back down again in a deathly swoop. The thrusters were on a slow burn, before gradually sputtering out.
“Captain, give up the Device,” the smooth tones of the alien intelligence said.
16
Just Like the Rest of Us
The Mercury Blade had crossed the top of its arc and was starting to swoop back down toward the planet surface. Even the sky above had started to deepen a tantalizing midnight blue, going from high and clear to darker as the Mercury almost made it to the upper atmosphere before the boosters cut out. Now, though, Eliard was looking at the golden expanse of the dunes rushing toward them. How high up were they? A few kilometers? More? He wondered how long it would take for a metal bird as aerodynamic as the Mercury to slice through the thin atmosphere to the sands below. Not long. Seconds, maybe.
“Alpha, give me back control of my ship!” The captain wrestled with the ship’s wheel to angle the flight fins so that at least they could glide a little, rather than fall.
“You have something that I want, Captain Martin,” the static-filled robot voice said.
“How is this overgrown toaster seizing control of my ship! Irie!” Eliard bawled, flicking the thruster switches again and again. The surface was getting closer. Filling the view screen.
“I am the most advanced data-intelligence the human universe has ever known, Captain Martin,” the suave tones of Alpha responded. “I think that I can find a way to triangulate a directed packet of transmitted code to your location.”
It’s hacked the Mercury? The captain snarled. Of course it had. It could do anything. Wasn’t that what Irie had said? As he thought of his mechanic, he heard her tones coming across the internal ship communicator. At least Alpha hadn’t turned that off yet…
“Working on it, Captain. Give me a moment!”
Eliard could now see the individual shapes of the dunes and the gullies between them. “We haven’t got a moment!”
“Captain, this is ridiculous. Are you really suggesting that you would rather end your small, limited, and all that you have biological lifespan for a few trinkets?” Alpha sounded, if anything, amused.
Clearly, this hybrid alien intelligence knew nothing at all about the impulses and inclinations of a pirate captain. “What, kill us all just to spite you? Sure.” Martin started to cackle, feeling his heart fill with a dark, manic glee. “And how are you going to recover the Device once we’re a smoking ruin?”
The ground was getting closer—
“I don’t have to recover it. It’s designed to kill me. My existence would be easier if I let you die.”
“Hold on!” Val boomed behind them, and Eliard felt the Blade suddenly rock and skip a little higher in the air. Underneath them, the viewing cameras showed that the Duergar had swiveled the twinned meson rail cannons and was firing them in bursts behind them like short-burn thrusters. BOOM! Another paired shot, and the Mercury skipped shallowly once more.
“I killed the railgun stabilizers,” Val Pathok bellowed. “The Mercury gets full recoil.”
And that meant there were no stabilizers to absorb the shock of the cannon’s report, Eliard realized. “Val, you’re a genius!”
A grunt in response. He had bought them seconds, at best, but they were valuable seconds for Eliard to think with.
“All you have to do is to accept my offer. Say ‘yes’ and I will return full control of your ship to you,” Alpha said.
“No!”
But a thought was making its way through Eliard’s mind. Why didn’t Alpha just let them die? Why offer them this deal? The captain knew that it was a machine intelligence, albeit a highly-evolved machine intelligence. He was no expert on computer systems, but didn’t that mean that it would always do what was the most logical? The most beneficial for its goals?
Eliard wished that Cassandra was still here. That she was still alive. She was the one who had the head for this kind of stuff. She was the analyst, and he was just a runaway nobleman’s son, and a pirate.
We’re going to die.
Think, Eliard! It was almost as if he could hear what the House Archival Agent would say inside his head. She wouldn’t let him give up until they had a solution. He had to think, and the ground wasn’t going away anytime soon. In fact, their skipping glides were getting shallower and lower. The sand was only a few hundred meters below them.
If Alpha is a machine intelligence, then it must think that there is a benefit to bargaining for our lives. That it’s BETTER for it to bargain for our lives rather than to just let us crash and die, the captain thought, still wrenching and adjusting the flight fins to try and prolong their perilous death-glide.
“No,” the captain murmured out loud. All of a sudden, with this realization, he felt like he had been reborn. He felt once again like he was in control. This was a negotiation, and he was very, very good at negotiations. It was one of the few skills—apart from flying—that made him excel at being a pirate. I know what you want, sucker. He started to grin.
“No what, Captain?” Alpha said imperiously. “You are refusing my offer to survive?”
Alpha wanted them alive, at least for the moment. Maybe it didn’t understand the Device, or it couldn’t trust that someone else wouldn’t pick up the Device once they had crashed, or it wanted to interrogate them. For whatever reason, Eliard knew that it served the Valyien-Armcore intelligence to have them not-die right now.
“You know what, tinpot?” the captain said to the static screen. “Screw you.” He shoved the ship’s wheel down, straight down, and kicked at the pedal that controlled the flight panels The Mercur
y suddenly shifted in mid-air and started sweeping down, straight toward the ground.
“Captain! What are you doing!?” Val roared, thrown forward in his seat.
“Ha-ha-ha-ha!” Eliard was similarly spread-eagled over his ship’s wheel, as the sand and rocks filled the screen ahead of him. He wondered if he would close his eyes before they died. No, probably not. A part of him actually felt insanely powerful, and marvelously good about what he was doing. It was that dark, manic part of him that he used to avoid. Now no more.
There was a sudden hiss of static, and lights swept on across the console. More important than that, the controls moved under his hand, the ship’s wheel turning sharply to one side to spin them—one wing low, another wing high, and then the thrusters along one side of the vessel fired, followed by the other, and then main back boosters to send them careening up into the sky once more. The Mercury’s belly scraped the top of a sand dune on the way up, spreading dust and rocks far and wide.
“Captain, what the hell just happened?” Irie shouted angrily over the communicators. Then, more calmly, followed by, “I think I found a way to keep Alpha out of our system, but you’re not going to like it.”
“Do it!” Eliard shouted as the sky above them started to fade from cerulean blue to a misty white, and then soon to a deeper midnight blue that he knew prefaced the blacks of space itself. The Mercury started to shake and rattle.
“You cannot escape me, Captain,” said the voice of Alpha once more as the central viewing screen filled with static. This time, it seemed to make no attempt to take control of the entire ship. “Any time that you are in connection with data-space—which is all the time, thanks to humanity’s obsession with connectivity—I will be there. I will be able to step in the way of every plan you make, every ill-conceived mission, every scheme…”
“But you’re still just like the rest of us,” Eliard said gleefully. He wasn’t sure if this was his manic elation saying these words, or whether he truly believed it. The captain felt like he had already lost so much, what did it matter what he lost now?
The sky was turning a deeper black, and now sparks of crimson, orange, and green fire were burning over the cockpit’s nose as they started to achieve escape velocity.
“How do you calculate that, Captain? I am nothing like you. I am a superior evolutionary intelligence. The next stage of life in the cosmos.” Alpha seemed to gloat.
“But that’s the thing, isn’t it, Alpha?” Eliard spat back. “For all your processing power, for all of your talk of your mighty, mighty data-space power, you still live in the universe, don’t you?”
“I hardly see how stating the facts proves your case, Captain.”
“You still want things, tin can.” The captain started to snigger. “You still want to achieve things. To get things, to win.” Just like the rest of us, just like me, the captain thought.
“Having achievable program parameters is not a weakness, Captain. It is only your skewed biological sense of honor and morality which assumes that they are,” the robot voice pointed out.
“No, now it’s you that doesn’t get it.” The captain’s voice lost some of its fervor as the ship around him shook, and his thoughts were driven inside of himself, to all of the things that he had wanted in his life but had never achieved. To please his father. For his father to love him, to be proud of him. To be the best officer at the academy. To be the best pirate in the Trader’s Belt. To be respected, feared, hated…loved.
For Cassandra not to die.
None of these things had come to pass, and it wasn’t just because he was reckless, or foolhardy, or didn’t try hard enough.
“The thing is, Alpha, that if you’re alive in this universe, that means you want things, and if you want things, then it doesn’t matter just how intelligent or how many computations you can do a nanosecond. You gotta share your existence with other people, and those other people have always got the ability to screw up your best laid plans,” he said bitterly. Just like Ponos had screwed up my plans, to build a life out there in space, captaining the best pirate crew in existence…a crew that had Cassandra on board.
Just like he had aced every flight test that the academy had given him, and the written ones, and had even become a master sharpshooter and fencer—all so his father wouldn’t look at him like he was a piece of dirt. Nothing that Eliard could ever do would have been enough for his father the general. No scheme or plan that Eliard could ever put into motion would ever count.
“But, Captain Martin, I have already conducted extensive psychological assessments of each of your crew, and I can predict, with a high degree of certainty—with an eighty-seven percent success rate—what each of you will do at any given time. There is no randomness, Captain, not even amongst living systems.”
The sky above started to turn a deep and true black, pricked with stars. The shaking and rushing of the Mercury Blade was starting to subside as they emerged from the top envelope of Shambar’s atmosphere. The sight of the starry sky had always worked previously to lift the captain’s spirits, ever since he was a little boy. Now his mind was clouded with indecision. He had let himself start thinking about Cassandra once more, and that wound in his heart had naturally led him to start thinking about his father, and every time that he had let everyone else down and they had let him down.
Maybe Alpha was right. Maybe it has already predicted just what I will do… But then the words of Ponos, the other Armcore machine intelligence, hovered in his memory. Ponos had told him that he, Captain Eliard Martin, had been spared and chosen to retrieve the Device because he was one of evolution’s outliers. He was one of those people who exploited minority possibilities. He was reckless, true. But he was daring, he was brave—he and the Mercury Blade’s success was due to the fact that his crew could subconsciously analyze a situation and consistently make one of the least likely outcomes work for them.
Well, it helped to be as stubborn as hell, Eliard thought.
“Captain, I got the answer!” Irie was saying as the screen started to fill with static once more, Alpha presumably wanting to have the last word.
Not today.
“Do it,” Eliard ordered. “I don’t care what it is, do it.”
“Right you are, boss. Grab your oxygen masks!” Irie said, and there was a deep, mechanical grunt from the Mercury Blade as suddenly, and without warning, every power system from the dual warp cores to the boosters, the communicators, the artificial gravity generators, sensors, and oxygen extractors shut down.
“Garp!” Eliard felt his body react instinctively to the sudden depletion of available oxygen in the ship. He had mere moments to get to the emergency masks, which thankfully, as part of the final shut-down procedure, had burst out of their side-mounted cases on either side of the cockpit interior. One for the captain, and another for emergencies. He knew that inside the main hold where Val Pathok was, there would be another four bursting from their own day-glow orange units, and from the sounds of gasping and grunting, the mobile mountain that was the Duergar was already leveraging himself out of his gunnery harness and swimming for the nearest one.
Swimming was the correct term, because the ship-wide loss of services also meant that the graviton collectors in place throughout the ship were also without power, and Eliard was currently lifting from the floor, one gloved hand grabbing the ship’s wheel and the other swinging out for the dangling mask.
Gotcha! His chest was starting to feel tight as he grabbed the visor with its floating, external oxygen filtration sacs and pulled it over his head.
Ah. He could breathe again, but it was an emergency solution—these masks could only filter about 70% of the necessary oxygen needed from the ambient atmosphere, and were designed as a last resort for stranded sailors. You were supposed to put them on, activate some kind of emergency signaling device, and retire as quickly as possible to an escape pod.
Only the Mercury Blade didn’t have any escape pods. It was too small a ship to include them, a
nd the extra weight and bulk would have made it slower in the skies. The Mercury was actually a retro-fitted racer, an elite racer that was never supposed to have the hardened poly-carbon armor grafted on as an external hull, and never meant to have the twin railguns mounted below its belly. But it did.
Maybe I should have conceded to Irie to get that escape pod set up in the end, the captain thought, too late, as usual.
But the static on the screens ahead had gone, just as every light on board the console had disappeared. There was nothing else now but the glimmers of light from the distant stars shining through the port windows as the Mercury started to shift and turn, losing all direction as the last cut-off burn of the boosters continued to exert its influence, pushing them into a slow, balletic roll that was completely uncontrolled or coordinated thanks to the lack of stabilizers and compensatory rockets.
And it was cold, too, the captain thought. Without the life support systems—the water filtration, the borrowed heat from the warp cores sent channelling around the vessel, or even the heat of the boosters and the many electrical devices—the ship was nothing but a metal box floating through the void of space. And that meant that the insides of this boat would be nigh on uninhabitable in just a little while. The crew are going to need full encounter suits, Eliard thought, turning to tell Val—somehow, he would have to signal to him without any radio communications—only to see that the Duergar was already working to hammer and pull at one of the cargo units that held the emergency encounter suits. Not that the Duergar needed his, as he was still wearing his much larger, carapace-style combat encounter suit, which meant that he already had insulation to stop his blood from freezing. And enough armor to stop a medium laser blast.
But just as the captain was about to swim down through the small stairwell that led from the cockpit to the main hold, something glinted in the dark screens outside and caught his eye.
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