Blue Planet

by S E T Ferguson

  Unfortunately, as Beryl’s eyes adjusted, she saw that their luck was about to run out. As Vlad turned the Bird so its nose faced back toward the docking platform door through which they had entered the docking bay, Beryl saw that they had a welcoming party.

  A welcoming party of AI.

  Except instead of the four physical forms of the ship’s AI they had all seen on that first disastrous trip up to the Earth ship, there were now twelve of them.

  And every single one of the Earth’s AI was standing at the ready, prepared to fire their weapons at the Columbinians as they got off of the Birds.

  Beryl looked at the twelve AI and realized she already missed the drones that had attacked them back on Columbina.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The fourteen of them stood at the back of the Bird, two rows of people and Iris dressed in black protective body gear and black helmets, the visors of the helmets reflecting the scene around them. They faced the door of the Bird, which would soon open to the Earth AI and other, unknown dangers.

  Beryl rubbed the cheek of her helmet against her shoulder, attempting to scratch an itch that she couldn’t get rid of. Iris had created the gear overnight using their manufacturing printers. Iris had assured them that the light armor would provide significant protection against the dumb bullets the drones had used on Columbina.

  “Not perfect protection,” Iris had told them, “but much better than the jeans and t-shirts you all wore to take on the drones before. It’s a wonder more of you weren’t hurt or killed.”

  When she had said that more than a few of the people who had volunteered to go to the Earthlings’ ship had not-so-quietly grumbled about the lack of armor being Iris’s fault, even if all of them knew there had been no way for her to manufacture armor for all of them before the drone attack.

  Even though she had been able to make them armor for this attack, what Iris hadn’t been able to do overnight was come up with protective gear for their dogs, which meant Beryl kept looking down, expecting to see Camp and not finding him there. Beryl tried to remember that the dog was safe and sound—or as safe and sound as he could be—back on Columbina, but she still would have liked to have had him there.

  Iris had completed their gear with backpacks. Each of them had a bit of water and food. Beryl suspected most of them also carried good luck charms.

  Beryl tried not to think about the extra item Iris had put in her backpack earlier that morning.

  It was definitely not a good luck charm.

  Beryl tried to rub the itch again.

  “You do realize that’s not going to work,” Vlad’s voice came through Beryl’s phone.

  “I can’t get comfortable in this thing. The moment I can take this helmet off, it’s coming off.”

  Someone spoke over the open channel Iris had for them. “Does anyone know the odds on us actually taking over this alien hunk of junk?”

  Beryl recognized the voice of Heming, who was on one of the other Birds. They were only supposed to use the channel for important information, though in Heming’s mind—and probably in the minds of more than a few others in their group—this definitely counted as important information.

  “Two to one. It seems people think these aliens have a chance,” Iris said. Beryl wondered if this was the appropriate time or place to be discussing the fact that, at those odds, the smart money was on the aliens to win this fight. Which meant, back on Columbina, people were betting that the aliens were about to beat them.

  “Iris, put all my credits on us. These Earth bastards aren’t going to know what hit them when I am through with them,” Heming said. Beryl realized it was probably a good bet; after all, if they lost, they weren’t coming back.

  “Me too,” Beryl added. If she didn’t come back, it wasn’t like there was someone who needed her money. Might as well take the chance that she would come back from this mission with more money than she could probably ever spend in her lifetime.

  Vlad’s voice came in over the voices of everyone else, talking to her privately.

  “For someone who isn’t a regular gambler, that’s quite a bet.”

  On the shared channel a few others piped up, asking to have bets placed on them. Beryl wondered if anyone with them was placing a bet the other way, using a private channel to do so with Iris. If so, she didn’t want to know.

  “It’s not much of a gamble if you know you’re going to win,” Beryl said. Vlad didn’t answer her, but she knew he would be smiling behind his helmet. “I didn’t hear you take the bet.”

  “That’s because I got us at 3 to 1.”

  “Betting on this is hereby cut off,” Iris cut into the discussion, ending the window for betting, “Now, it’s time to roll. I’m opening the doors now.”

  As Iris’s words ended, the doors to the three Birds opened simultaneously. For a second, Beryl wondered if Iris had done that to give them the element of surprise against the AI.

  It was a second Beryl didn’t have to spare.

  She felt the bullet hit her chest before she heard the sounds of the Earth AI’s weapons an instant later.

  Her gamble on the humans suddenly didn’t seem like such a good one.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Vlad yelled something unrecognizable and stepped in front of Beryl’s falling body before without thinking. He emptied a dozen shots from his gun at the Earth AI, shooting blindly at them in a rage.

  In front of him, seven of the twelve Earth AI exploded in showers of sparks, like the first set of drones they had sent to Columbina.

  He didn’t know if he had hit any of them, or if the kills belonged to others, but he didn’t care. He aimed at one of the remaining five AI and a dozen more bullets rained down from his gun among hundreds from the others around him.

  The remaining five blew up as easily as the first seven.

  And like that, the shooting ended. The whole thing had lasted maybe four seconds.

  Vlad dropped to his knees next to Beryl as Iris pushed through the group to do the same on the others side of her.

  He wiped the visor of her helmet, looking for any break in it, then did the same to her chest armor. There didn’t seem to be any issues with it, but perhaps it was too small to see.

  “Beryl, are you OK?” Iris’s voice came across Vlad’s phone.

  “Ow,” Beryl said, her voice coming across Vlad’s phone. She sat up, and Vlad put his arm on her back, helping her sit up. “That’s going to leave a mark.”

  The other Columbinians, seeing that Beryl was alright despite having been shot, exchanged some high fives and descended out of the Bird to where other Columbinians were already headed.

  “Help me up.” Vlad stood up, then gave Beryl a hand to help her to her feet.

  “Iris,” she said as they descended from the Bird, “I thought this armor was supposed to keep us from getting hurt.”

  “Are you dead?”

  “No.”

  “Then the armor did its job.” Vlad didn’t have to see Beryl’s face to know she was giving Iris a skeptical look. He was sure Iris knew she was doing it as well.

  At the bottom of the open door to the Bird, shards of metal and other pieces of what had once been the Earth AI’s physical forms littered the ground. Vlad leaned over and picked up a small piece, examining it in the docking bay light. He couldn’t tell what part of the AI it had been, but it didn’t matter. He slung his backpack around and put it away as a souvenir. Around him, many others were doing the same.

  “Did that seem overly easy?” Vlad asked Beryl, standing beside him and rubbing her armor where the bullet must have hit her. There wasn’t so much as a dent on it.

  “Something you probably wouldn’t be saying if you had been the one person who got shot.”

  “Still. We destroyed twelve of the smartest beings in the known universe in less than five seconds. There has to be a fight up here somewhere.”

  Above them, a loudspeaker on the ship crackled, and a voice rang out. It was a male voice
, but at the same time, there was something almost robotic about it.

  “Humans,” the voice boomed, “we recommend you surrender now. We have drones all over this ship which will kill each and every one of you before you can implement whatever inept…”

  The voice cut out as quickly as it had begun.

  “That’s enough of that,” Iris said. Apparently, one of the systems she had control over was the ship’s loudspeakers. “Now, everyone, get over here and let’s show this Earth AI who really is inept.”

  The several dozen Columbinians on the ship gathered around Iris.

  “How many of the physical AI are left?” Someone asked.

  “None that I know of. I still don’t know how many drones are up here, either,” Iris said, cutting off what she knew would be the next line of inquiry. “Does anyone have any other last questions before we get moving out of here?”

  A lot of heads shook negative responses, and a few others came across the open channel.

  “Good. And if you have any questions during this, do not hesitate to let me know. I want to bring all of you back to Columbina alive and well. Now, let’s go kick some alien ass.”

  A few cheers went up from the gathered group. Vlad was impressed at how well-organized they were after virtually no training. The three main groups headed out to different parts of the ship gathered together, while a small group moved toward the Birds, where they would remain in case anyone was injured. Everyone hoped that group’s services would be unnecessary, though no one had any illusions about the dangers they were about to face.

  After all, no humans had ever attempted to take over an alien ship before.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Beryl formed up into one of the two lines in their group headed out to the bridge of the Earth AI’s ship.

  “Do you have it?” Beryl heard Iris ask her over her phone. Iris didn’t have to tell Beryl what she meant by “it.” “It” was something Beryl couldn’t forget.

  “Yes, I have it. I wasn’t about to leave it back on Columbina,” Beryl said, though she had seriously considered leaving it there. Iris didn’t need to know that.

  Beryl had started thinking of the item in her backpack “Plan F”—for “we’re f’d”—if all their other plans failed. Plan A was to have Iris take over the ship from the bridge. Plan B involved having Beryl head to the core of the ship, where the AI would keep their computing power. If Iris couldn’t access the controls she needed on the bridge, Beryl would have to head to the core and physically reboot the entire ship, using some sort of master control.

  As Iris had explained it, this basically consisted of a switch Beryl would have to reset. Or, as Beryl had started to think of it, their lives could very well depend on her ability to turn the power of the Earthlings’ ship on and off.

  It was one of the most absurd things Beryl might ever be asked to do.

  Unfortunately, Plan B ran the genuine risk that Iris couldn’t get the ship back online. If that happened, all of them were going to die very painfully on the Earth ship in view of Columbina and safety.

  If Plan B didn’t work, they would go to Plan F. If they got that far, no one was going home, either Earthling or Columbinian. But at least they wouldn’t all die slowly and painfully.

  “Time to roll out.” Iris’s voice now rang over their group’s communication channel. They were the last of the groups to leave the docking platform, and Beryl took a look back as they did from her spot near the back of the two lines. She caught a glimpse of Fawn, one of the medical group who was there to help them if anything happened.

  When Fawn had volunteered to come up with them as a nurse, Beryl had wondered why Iris would have let someone who had just lost all of her family to come with them. Surely, Beryl had thought, that sort of trauma meant she should not have been part of the group.

  “She also has more reason to want to defeat the Earth AI than anyone else,” Iris had told her when Beryl expressed her doubts. Beryl had tried not to suppress her next thought, which was that Fawn didn’t have anything to lose by fighting this battle.

  Sort of like herself.

  Beryl steeled herself as she turned a corner out of the docking bay and headed into the heart of the Earthlings’ ship. She might not have had anything to lose, but she would rather return to Columbina at the end of this fight.

  On her phone, Beryl had a map of the ship that Iris had put together from the ship, but Beryl knew she wouldn’t need to refer to it during their trip to the bridge. She had memorized their path.

  No one around her was looking at their phones, either. Apparently, Beryl was not the only one who had spent part of the evening before memorizing the map.

  Ahead of her, Iris and the rest of the group walked at a speed faster than normal, but still well within an easy gait for the group. Iris was in front of Beryl, in the middle of the group. The day before, the group decided it was the safest place for Iris, as they could defend her from the front and back as necessary.

  The group walked in pairs through the dim hallways of the Earthlings’ ship, headed toward the center of the ship where the elevators and stairs that would take them to the bridge level were located. Vlad was paired with Beryl, standing to her right. As they walked, Beryl wondered if Vlad was thinking about the ship through which they walked. In one sense, it was very familiar. The layout was basically the same as that of Hodios, where the both of them had spent half of their lives. In another sense, it was completely unfamiliar, like someone had taken the shell of Hodios and made it into an old-fashioned, sterile form of their former home. To Beryl, it felt like she was walking through a dream, where things were familiar enough to feel normal, but so slightly off that they felt at the same time completely abnormal.

  The front of their group turned a corner. From where she was near the back of the group, all Beryl saw as they did so was the head of Iris in front of her and the heads up display of her helmet showing an image of an Earthling drone somewhere in front of that. Beryl heard the explosion of gunfire around the corner and saw the scene on her helmet’s camera, even though she couldn’t see it herself. It seemed that everyone who was around the corner had opened fire without any concern for ammunition or the ship around them.

  “Jesus, calm down, people!” Iris yelled when the shooting stopped and the rest of them turned the corner. “It’s probably best not to shoot so much that we destroy portions of the ship.”

  One of the two men in the front of the line spoke up. “What, are we going to blow up the ship if we hit something?”

  “Probably not,” Iris said. “The key word in that sentence, though, is ‘probably.’ So stop shooting up the ship, if you can help it.”

  “Got it. Shoot the drones, not the ship,” one of the men in the front of the line said. He fist bumped the man next to him.

  The group continued on, working its way toward the stairs, as Iris was not letting them take the elevators. On the way, they ran into two more drones, each easily taken out by a single shot. Iris’s words had apparently worked to get them to calm down on the shooting, though Beryl could feel the desire of those around her to get a chance to take out a drone or two. They weren’t the only ones; Beryl wanted her chance to take one out as well.

  Beryl hadn’t actually seen one of the drones, except through her helmet camera. It seemed that the drones had no way to tell they were coming until the Columbinians were right on top of them. It was hardly a fair fight.

  “I think they’re ‘seeing’ us when they detect movement,” Iris had told them, though, by the time she did, Beryl was pretty sure everyone had figured that out for themselves. At least, she had, and she knew Vlad would have figured it out as well. “Their reaction time, even when they see us, is pretty slow. Keep an eye out for anything that moves that our drones don’t detect, and take it out before it gets a chance to take one of us out.”

  “Got it,” one of the men up front had said.

  Seventeen drones later and still with no shots from the drones
, the group reached the stairs that would take them to the bridge level. Next to it, an elevator stood, tantalizing them. It was only three levels up to the bridge, but very few of them were in great shape. After coming the short distance they had, a couple members of the group were already looking as if they wouldn’t make it up the steps if they had to.

  “Fine,” Iris said, shaking her head, “take the elevator.”

  The two men up front gave each other another fist bump, and several others let out a small whoop of relief and happiness at not having to find out how out of shape they were.

  A finely tuned military unit, this was not.

  The door to the elevator opened, and the group got on, easily able to fit into the large space with room to spare. As the elevator lurched up, Beryl caught her breath. Iris seemed unfazed at the jerky motion, so unlike the smooth elevators on Hodios and V, which smoothly moved from floor to floor in a manner where those on board could hardly tell they were moving at all.

  With the group mostly silent, the elevator reached the top floor of the ship, where the bridge was located. The doors of the elevator slid open with a familiar whoosh Beryl hadn’t heard recently but knew from her childhood on Hodios. The Earthlings’ ship may have seemed slow and out-of-date, but it was still familiar.

  As soon as the doors opened, they saw they weren’t alone.

  On the other side of the elevator door, four drones faced them.

  The four people in the front of the group let loose, despite Iris’s warning. They destroyed the drones in quick succession, though two of the drones got shots off—the first shots any of the drones had gotten off on them yet. If any of the shots hit one of the group from Columbina, they didn’t show it. Based on how much the shot had hurt, Beryl suspected this meant the drone’s shots missed.