The Last Dance

by Martin L Shoemaker

  “Will do, sir.” Carver braked at a safe distance from the Bradbury, and then he turned me to face him. It wasn’t necessary for a comm conversation, but it was a common courtesy. “So, Smith, are those bull-fighting rumors I hear true?”

  “It was bull riding, Lieutenant, not fighting. But what do you have in mind?”

  “Deece is an algorithm. Whatever she does, she does to a pattern. If I can see that pattern, I can defeat it. But one observation doesn’t show me the pattern.”

  I nodded. “So you need to see how she reacts when someone approaches.”

  “Yep. She doesn’t have a lot of choices here, only a limited number of jets to fire. She’s also constrained by the existing tumble. If I can see her react a few more times, I’ll be able to predict her next move.”

  “Understood, sir.” I turned back to the Bradbury, and I called out, “Toro! Toro!” I fired my MU and dove toward the hull.

  Behind me, Carver called, “Keep your eyes open, Smith. Don’t get too close.”

  I had no intention of getting too close, but I did appreciate his plan. That bull-riding contest hadn’t been a sanctioned event, just a bunch of drunken spacers camping on a ranch near São Paulo, but we had to do much the same thing: bait the bull, figure out his moves, and find a chance to leap aboard. Not smart, you say. Did I mention we were drunk? Pretty risky, you say. Did I mention we were spacers? We thrive on risk, or we wash out. Besides, no one was hurt, not even the bull.

  So I made a few passes at the ship. Once I knew what to look for, it wasn’t nearly as dangerous as that bull: like Carver said, there were only so many jets, and they could only do so much to change the momentum. It was easy to see the signs and dodge out of the way.

  Of course, just as I was feeling smug, the ship made an unexpected turn. Instead of trying to sideswipe me with the hull, it spun on its core, swinging the antenna package around and hitting me with the big Earth antenna like a giant baseball bat. The spin wasn’t that fast in itself, but my own momentum added to the impact. I was stunned by the hit, and by yet another stab in my damned ribs—just when I was sure the osteo-nanos had finished their work—and I twirled away in my own unexpected tumble.

  Before I could recover my senses, Carver caught me. “Are you all right, Smith?”

  I caught my breath so I could answer: “All right . . . sir. Just winded, and a little twinge. Give me a minute, and I’ll make another pass.”

  “No need.” Carver pushed a program to my MU. “I’ve got her pattern figured out. This program will guide us through a tandem approach. We’ll enter through different sites, and that will confuse Deece. Her reaction to you will be canceled out by her reaction to me, and vice versa. She’ll probably kick at the last moment; but if you grab something and hold on tight, she won’t be able to shake you. You’ll be entering through the engineering deck in the aft. I’ll be up in secondary command.”

  I couldn’t probe my ribs through the bodysuit, so I couldn’t tell if there was more damage there, but my suit diagnostics were green. I nodded. “Let’s do this, Lieutenant.”

  Carver tapped his comp, and our jets fired microbursts, separating us. When we were about thirty meters apart, our jets turned and fired again, hurling us toward the tumbling Bradbury. For a moment I doubted Carver’s coding as I sped straight for the unyielding hull; but then the ship tumbled some more, and the giant gash turned into view, and I was headed straight for the aft end. But still too fast! I held back my panic, trusting Carver; and sure enough, the jets fired again to slow me down and align me with the ship.

  And oh, Carver was smooth. Just before I impacted inside the gash, the jets fired sideways, pushing me through the hole in the engineering bulkhead and onto the engineering deck. Half a second later, just as Carver predicted, the deck kicked toward me, catching me unawares and bouncing me off a wall; but instead of knocking me out into space, the move merely knocked me to the far wall, where I was able to grab a handgrip and hold on tight. The ship tossed three more times in different directions, like a horse trying to shake off a rider, but my grip held. And after the third kick, the ship settled down into a dizzying but steady tumble.

  I opened the comm channel. “Lander 1, Smith. I am aboard the Bradbury.”

  An immediate answer came: “Lander 1, Carver. Same here. Repeat, we are aboard and secure.”

  “Expedition, lander 1,” the captain answered. “Good job. Now don’t waste time. If you can null that roll, it will buy us lots of time and lots of cargo. But watch your backs. Deece may have more surprises for you. Go!”

  My bull-riding experience served me well that day. The wall tossed and twisted, but I held on as I got my bearings. The engineering deck was almost unrecognizable: the main reactor was gone, and in its place was a charred mess where fire had fought to catch hold but had failed as the air fled the deck. But the chaff from the exploding magnets had been as bad as any fire, shredding the engineering consoles into unrecognizable tangles of metal, glass, and wires. On the plus side, that included the security monitors. Deece couldn’t watch me in here.

  I didn’t have many landmarks to orient myself with, but I had enough. The remnants of the reactor told me where I was on the deck. I had bounced off the inner wall and landed on the outer wall. The inner wall had a hatch to the main shaft, almost directly opposite from the reactor. Since the shaft itself had survived the explosion, surely the hatch had as well.

  Timing the tumble, I leaped back to the inner wall. I might not be as precise as an MU computer, but I was good enough after months in zero G on the trip to Mars. I hit the wall with a bump, just enough to rattle me, but I grabbed another handgrip and started working my way around the shaft, one grip at a time. A few times I felt a stab in my ribs as I twisted in an odd direction, but nothing near as bad as jogging across Coprates quadrangle.

  As I rounded the shaft, I saw that it had indeed sheltered the far half of the deck from the worst of the reactor explosion. The consoles and systems on that side looked mostly functional: air and water recycling, waste processing, and reaction jets. Maybe if Carver couldn’t shut down Deece, we could manually control those systems from here.

  I worked my way around to the hatch, and I checked its readouts. Automatic access was offline—Deece controlled that—but all hatches had manual controls as well. The readouts showed no pressure on the other side. That made things easier, since I didn’t have to try to enter against pressure. I opened the cover on the manual controls, pulled out the handle, and gave it a twist.

  The hatch sprung open, throwing me violently across the deck. Damn Deece! The readouts had been a lie. I was glad the hatches were designed with hydraulic brakes to slow them down. Otherwise the hatch could’ve hit me hard enough to crack my bodysuit. Still, it had been fast enough to cost me my hold. I slammed into the wall, bouncing off and right back at the hatch. I held my left arm up to shield my visor, while with my right I scrabbled for a hold. I barely got a grip on the hatch edge, but that was enough to slow me down. I lowered my left arm, reached inside the hatch, and grabbed the inner controls. That gave me a better grip, good enough to swing my legs up and pull myself into the main shaft, even against the push of escaping air.

  If I’d had to pull the hatch shut, I could never have done it. Interior pressure on the Bradbury was one atmosphere, 14.7 pounds per square inch, and the hatch had a lot of square inches. Adika himself couldn’t have pulled it shut without help. Fortunately, I had help, more hydraulics. I grabbed the close lever and pulled on it, and the hatch sealed itself.

  I was breathing heavily from the exertion, but I got on the comm. “Carver, don’t trust readouts. Deece is using them to mislead us. I just opened a hatch under pressure, thanks to her.”

  Carver sounded better than me when he answered, but he also sounded concerned. “Smith, Carver. I read you. So does she. Think.”

  Damn, that made sense. Anything we said on the comms, Deece would know. We would have to stay off comms unless it was critical. So Carver w
as on his own, and I was too. I turned off my mic. No sense in letting Deece hear anything.

  Captain Aames wanted the perishables first. More than anything else, that meant Hydroponics, which was just two decks fore of engineering. Hydroponics split that ring with storage, and most of the storage cabin had been torn open by lander 2. I was pretty sure that the Hydroponics cabin would be undamaged, but I would have to go in to find out. Our survival could hinge on whether Hydroponics was intact or not. If we were really lucky, that cabin was full of racks and racks of Lada gardens: Russian-designed automated garden units with self-contained environments and systems for circulating nutrients and air. And there should also be more soil and nutrients. If it survived, it would be our own little slice of Eden. If it didn’t . . .

  When I got to the cabin door, the readouts looked bad. Way too bad: Vacuum. Radiation Hazard. Biohazard. Fire. Fire in a vacuum? “Ah, Deece,” I said to myself, “you’re a lousy liar.” That was a known fact; Carver had taught me that once: AIs were all about drawing correct inferences from limited models, so deliberately incorrect inferences were hard for them to formulate. Deece wanted to scare me away from Hydroponics, so she raised the alerts. All of them, as contradictory as they were.

  But maybe one of them was true. I couldn’t be certain. A fire would destroy the hydroponics and maybe cook me in my suit. So it was with caution that I pulled the manual hatch controls and slowly looked inside.

  No fire. No signs of rushing air. I would take my chances on biohazard and radiation. But what I didn’t expect was that all the Lada gardens would be dismounted from their racks and packed for shipping.

  “What the hell?” And then I saw movement at the far corner of the cabin, a figure bobbing near one of the Lada gardens and pulling lettuce out. I quickly pulled myself inside, closed and locked the hatch, and turned on my external speakers. “Dr. Weaver, is that you?”

  Anna Weaver, our ship’s doctor and telepilot, spun around. She saw me, her eyes lit up, and she leaped across the cabin at me. “Smith!” She wrapped herself around my bulky suit in an awkward hug, and her momentum threw us both back against the hatch. “You made it. Thank God, you made it!”

  I nodded, then pulled free of her arms. “Thanks to Captain Aames, who will be glad to see you. We didn’t dare hope for survivors. Is there anybody . . .” But my voice trailed off as her face fell. No need to answer.

  But she did. “Koertig and Uribe were in the mactory deck, doing maintenance on landers 3 and 4. From the angle, I’m sure the deck was lost.” I nodded agreement. “And Max, I heard him scream just before our comms cut out. I’m sure his death was instant.”

  I didn’t react, because I had already said good-bye to Katja and Normando and Max. And Anna. We were all so sure we had lost everyone. All of us except Captain Aames. He never gave up.

  Instead I turned to another question. “So how did you survive?”

  Weaver swallowed hard. “When Max was sure a collision was coming, he sent me down the main shaft to ensure that all the cabin hatches were secure. He was already thinking about salvage and how much we could preserve. He said Deece was flaky, and we couldn’t trust her to secure the hatches.”

  I nodded. “He wasn’t kidding.”

  Weaver continued, “So I wasn’t in the telepilot pod when the lander hit. I was well down the shaft. But the pod was wide open to the shaft at that point. As soon as the pod was cracked, air started whooshing out the bow. I grabbed the first hatch I could find, and I shut myself inside before the shaft was in vacuum. I was lucky it was the hatch with all the food.”

  “Lucky,” I agreed. “But the shaft is under pressure now. The forward emergency hatch must have sealed.”

  “Under pressure?” Weaver indicated the readouts near the hatch. “It still shows vacuum out there.”

  “Uh-huh. Deece is more than just flaky, Doctor. She has flipped back into security mode. She thinks we’re intruders. Probably you, too, since she has invalidated all ID codes. My guess is she’s using the fake vacuum to keep you a prisoner here.”

  Weaver nodded. “That makes sense. I had no suit in here, so I was stuck. Deece had told me I was unauthorized here, and I hadn’t been able to make sense of that. Finally, I turned off her pickups here.”

  “And then you decided to start packing up the food?” I waved my arm at the Lada units.

  “Uh-huh.” She pushed over to the units and started inspecting their meters. “I figured there were only two possibilities. You were all lost down there, dead or trapped, and it was only a matter of time until I was dead too. In that case, at least I would eat well until the end, and the Lada units would give me oxygen as well. Or somehow you would survive, get back to orbit, and come for this food.” She smiled. “I’ve served with Captain Aames before. I knew which way to bet, so I figured I would save us time if I got a head start on packing.”

  I admired her faith. I had known Aames a long time, but I was still learning to trust him like that. “This will certainly save us a lot of time. We should get these to the cargo landers immediately. But . . .”

  Weaver looked at me. “What’s the matter, Ensign?”

  I stared at the hatch. “There was pressure out there before. There might not be now. Deece is trying to protect the ship from us, and she’s trying every trick she can think up. The only weapon she has is deception. There might be vacuum out there now. Or she might open a hatch later, and you’re exposed. I need to get you a suit.”

  Weaver agreed, so we moved her and the Lada units as far from the hatch as possible before I carefully opened it. There was no airflow, so I dashed out and resealed it behind me. Then I went to the suit locker three decks forward, pulled out Weaver’s suit, and hauled it back to Hydroponics.

  When I got to the hatch, I had a new surprise. The readout screen was blank. I tapped on it, and nothing happened. Swiped the soft reset code, and still nothing happened. Finally I swiped the hard reset code, and the readout rebooted. After a few seconds, the readouts were back to normal, showing standard ship’s pressure and temperature inside.

  I didn’t trust whatever Deece might be up to, so I took a chance and called Carver. “Carver, Smith. Anything I should know about?”

  Carver’s voice was strange: relaxed, yet terse: “Smith, Carver. No worries. I have Deece in maintenance mode. Now she’s toothless.”

  “Good job, Lieutenant Carver!”

  “But I’m still busy trying to get control of the ship, so I hope you can handle the cargo without me.”

  “Oh, I can.” I smiled, though Carver couldn’t see it. “Dr. Weaver’s alive!”

  Carver stammered for a few seconds before he answered, “Fantastic! Okay, you two get to work. I’ll stabilize the Bradbury as soon as I can.”

  I was ready to sign off, when suddenly it occurred to me: What if this wasn’t really Carver? Deece could fake audio even easier than video. So I thought, and I made another call. “Carver, when I was in the top of the access shaft at landing pad C, remember that?”

  Carver paused, confused. Then he responded. “Oh, I understand, verification. Yes, Ensign.”

  “I dropped a bolt. What did you say about it?”

  “I said it was coated in butter. Now can I get back to work?”

  This time I grinned. “With my compliments, Lieutenant. You do nice work.”

  While Weaver suited up (we still didn’t trust Deece), I called Captain Aames to fill him in on all the good news and to get instructions. “Do we still toss gear overboard?”

  “Negative. Hsü, get aboard the Bradbury on your fastest safe course. Help Smith and Weaver pack the cargo landers, and then pack up everything you can find that will fit in the lander. Ladies and gentlemen, the more cramped we are on our ride home, the better.”

  We started packing Lada units into the cargo landers, and we made great time thanks to Weaver having prepped them for transport. We were two-thirds done when Hsü joined us; so I left them to that, and I went ahead looking for other items to sh
ip. Just like back in the shelter pit, the captain had given me an inventory of crucial items. I hunted those out first, stuffing them into bags and hanging them from handgrips in the main shaft. Weaver and Hsü followed behind me, Weaver hauling the bags off to the cargo landers, and Hsü inspecting each cabin for other valuable items. Without having to watch our backs for Deece’s next trick, the only real challenge was the constant tumble of the ship, but we managed that. It was just like an exercise.

  Soon I neared the front of the ship, right behind the forward emergency hatch. Beyond that were our personal cabins, the command deck, and the wreck of the telepilot pod. Those were all in vacuum, so we would wait to try to salvage from them. I turned to the next hatch, Computer Control, and went in.

  “How ya doing, Lieutenant?” Things were going better than I had dared hope, and I was in high spirits.

  But Carver’s brow was creased with concentration. “Still busy here, Smith.” He had strapped himself to the main computer station so he could work even as the ship tumbled. The cabin was dark, the way he liked to work on the computer, the only light coming from his monitor and playing across his dark face. He looked far more intense than he had on Mars, more in control.

  “All right, don’t mind me, I’m just gathering.” I bounced around the cabin, shining my light around, but there wasn’t a lot the captain had requested from there. Most of the computing power we would need was already on Mars. I gathered up some storage blocks, some tools, and some styluses, and I shoved them in a bag.

  While I worked, I glanced over Carver’s shoulder. As I watched, I gradually recognized what he was doing: he had disconnected Deece from the ship’s controls, and now he was slicing out her historical models, starting from the past and working forward. The current model was like a long thread through time, a series of historical models stitched together. They gave Deece memory, experience, an awareness of time, not just the present. Each historical model was a combination of data from multiple sources: the ship’s sensors, the AI knowledge base, mission rules and parameters from the Initiative, and a base model shipped up from Earth. Each new historical model was grafted onto the end and tied in to Deece’s knowledge engine, and that’s what she used to make her decisions.