“Is that possible, after all these centuries?” Mortimer asked.
“I suppose it might be,” he replied. “Right now, though, I’m more interested in that spear he was talking about. The salvo should be just down the other branch of the corridor.”
The two of them stepped out of the control room, leaving the sole occupant to continue his lonely vigil. Lights began to snap on as they walked, and Clarke turned his flashlight off, sliding it back into his pocket to preserve the batteries.
“Internal systems must be coming on,” he said. “Registering living beings walking the corridors.” Turning to her, he said, “I guess our late friend must have turned off any security they had. Nobody could bring his race back to life if they were shot to pieces at the entrance.”
“I admire your optimism,” she replied. “I’m not sure I share it, though. There’s another problem. We both know that those angels of his are still flying around outside, and if they saw us landing, then we could face another attack at any time.”
“That’s no truer now than it was a few minutes ago.”
“Except that we didn’t know then that we were in a position to do something about bringing them down,” she replied. “And if we know that, so must they. I can only think of one reason why they’d have left an installation like this open.”
“A trap?” he said, shaking his head. “With the power they must have, they’d have set the place to detonate as soon as anyone turned up. Certainly if someone made it down into the bunker. We can’t assume that our enemy is both omniscient and infallible, or we’re doomed before we start.”
“Stop throwing around long words like that,” she replied, cracking a smile. “You’re beginning to sound dangerously like a senior officer. Though you might have a point, and if they don’t know that this place exists, then I suppose that we might have at least some sort of...”
She stepped through the threshold, and her words fell away as the two of them saw what lay inside, a three-stage rocket with huge, long-swept wings by its side, something that might have been drawn out of an ancient textbook on rocketry. It was beautiful, sleek lines, tipped with a winged spaceplane. Intake jets littered the sides, and Clarke looked over it approvingly.
“Air-breathing rocket. Creates its own fuel.” Looking up at the spaceplane, he added, “That’s big enough to carry one hell of a payload. A platoon of troops, or a large bomb.”
“We don’t have the first, but I think we have the second,” she replied, waving her sensor pickup around. “Some radioactivity, and more power readings. Best guess is that we’re looking at a hundred-megaton bomb. You think that would be enough to smash that moon to a million pieces?”
“Possibly, but the shock wave would certainly destroy everything inside,” he replied. “I want to get up to that spaceplane. See if I can operate the controls. That’s our ticket out of here, and the best chance we’re going to have to complete our mission.”
“Or return to Base Camp,” Mortimer said.
He turned to her, and replied, “You really think we can sit in Base Camp and hope that the angels don’t follow us? The only way we’re going to get through this is to shoot that moon out of the sky. And besides, if we don’t get the wormhole map, Base Camp doesn’t have a damn thing to offer us anyway.”
“I liked you better when you were using long words,” she replied with a sigh.
Chapter 9
Harper walked through silent, empty streets, the echo of her footsteps the only apparent noise. A part of her knew that none of this was real, but somehow, she didn’t seem to register that with her conscious mind. As far as she was concerned, she had been walking for hours, but the streets seemed to remain the same, and she was neither hungry or tired. Indeed, she couldn’t seem to experience any sensation at all, just the constant streets, endless and eternal.
“Hello!” she shouted, the only response the echo of her cry resounding back upon her a dozen times. She reached into her pockets, finding nothing there, then stopped. “If this is a computer simulation,” she said, “then I’m going to find a way to break out of it, so you might as well give up now!” Taking a deep breath, she screamed, “Show yourselves!”
“Show yourselves,” her own voice replied, resounding from the high towers. “Show yourselves.” She stopped, looked around, and took a different path, walking down a side street, one which rapidly opened up into the same street she had seen before. That wasn’t an answer. She tried the nearest door, finding it unyielding, and hurled her whole weight against it, first once, then twice. The material didn’t give. She rubbed at her shoulder, expecting pain from the force of the impact, but once more, there was nothing. No trace that she had ever made the attempt. Somehow, that was precisely what she had expected.
Giving up on the surface, she climbed onto the nearest windowsill, then started to ascend the side of the tower as best she could, taking foothold after foothold, easing her way up the side of the tower. It felt easier than it should, as though someone was giving her a simple path to the top, but as she climbed higher, she realized that once again, the environment was repeating itself, the roof as far away as it had been when she began. She looked down at the street, seemingly a hundred feet below, and with a smile on her face, fell backwards, letting herself fall.
Evidently the original programmer had considered the possibility that one of the subjects might contemplate suicide. She hit the street, and the road had the consistency of a feather bed, easily absorbing the fall. Frowning, she slammed her fist onto the material, then tried to push at it, only to find that the road had retained its earlier feel.
Logically, anything physical that she could try would be fruitless. The computer had total control of the virtual environment in which she found herself, and without any programming access of her own, there seemed very little she could do about it. Repeating the environment was an old VR trick, designed to limit memory use, and while she’d never seen a virtual setting as realistic, as detailed as this, the software evidently had its limitations. A thought that she found oddly comforting, given the circumstances.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, her mind flooding back to the events that had led up to her capture. The battery on her goggles must have given out, and she’d been exposed to the full force of the influence of whatever it was that waited for her. Somehow, this wasn’t what she’d expected. She’d anticipated that she’d simply lose herself to the machine, the reprogramming washing through her neural engrams before she could even realize it, dying in all but name.
Instead, she was trapped in Purgatory.
“Hello!” she yelled. “Hello!”
Only the echoes answered her, but in the distance, she saw something moving, a small shape. Instantly, she raced to her feet, sprinting after the figure, a little girl wearing a computer technician’s jumpsuit. The girl stopped, turned, and looked at her, and Harper stopped with a start.
It was her.
At least, it was her as she had been two decades past, at the age of six, already anxious and inquisitive, already beginning to rebel against her father, putting herself on the path that would finally lead here, to a strange alien structure millions of light years from home, lost and abandoned. And yet there was something about the little girl’s face, something in the back of her eyes that seemed strange, distant, mysterious.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Perhaps I am you,” the child replied, in the voice of Harper’s past. “Perhaps this is just a dream, and you’ll wake up in a moment.”
Shaking her head, Harper answered, “This is no dream. A nightmare, perhaps, that I would accept, but this is not simply a dream. Who are you?”
“Perhaps I am all that you can perceive me to be?”
Frowning, she asked, “What do you mean?”
“Let me ask you a question. Where are you?”
Harper paused, then replied,
“In a computer-generated simulation, produced by the artificial intelligence we were seeking to attack.”
“No lie?” the child asked. “No attempt at deception?”
“If you have this level of access to my memories, my thoughts, then you know everything that I know already. Doesn’t seem much point in trying to lie to myself, anyway.”
Shaking her head, the child replied, “You’re stronger than you think. Stronger than you know. The mind has defenses that perhaps you don’t let understand, and they might be resisting. At least, for a time.” The child smiled, and continued, “I’m only telling you what you already know, and you’ve worked out already that nobody out there is listening to a word you say.”
“Then all of this is a creation of my own mind, not the AI?”
“Do you often talk to yourself like this?” the child asked. Overhead, storm clouds began to roll in, covering the sun, and Harper turned for a second to look at them. When she turned back, the child had disappeared, but she’d managed to tell Harper everything she needed to know. Rain began to fall from the sky, slamming into the ground with increasing ferocity, the first soft, gentle droplets becoming hardened hail, ricocheting from the road, hammering into her head. She began to shiver, looking around for a shelter, trying to find somewhere to protect herself from the rain. Running to the nearest door, she pounded on it again, attempting and failing to force it open. Then she held her breath, and smiled.
“This is my world,” she said. She looked up at the sky, and attempted to will the clouds away. At first, it had no effect, the intensity of the downpour worsening if anything, but then it began to disperse, slowly fading away. Just as she thought she was making progress, a thunderclap startled her, and the rain began to fall in sheets, torrents of water that drenched her.
“This is my world!” she shouted. If she couldn’t fight off the attack, perhaps there was something else she could do. Looking at the door, she tried to visualize the room on the other side, warm and inviting, and then mentally pictured the handle turning, the door opening, allowing her the shelter she needed.
And it was so.
She quickly stepped inside, out of the rain, shivering from the cold, and reached for the blanket she had visualized, wrapping it around her shoulders as she dripped on the floor. Closing the door, she settled down in a chair, and looked out of the window at the storm, still gathering and building outside.
This was an attack, the AI still trying to batter through her internal firewall, to weaken her defenses. Everything here was unreal, but whether her mind had simply retreated into psychosis or was fighting for its life on the fringes of some sort of super-realistic simulation was less clear. She tended towards the latter, if only because of the circumstances in which she found herself. There was definitely some sort of battle being waged, one fought in the confines of her mind.
And yet, this was also almost certainly a simulation of some sort. The repeated terrain was proof enough of that. She was beginning to conclude that the outside world was a creation of the AI, but that she had sufficient influence to create her own space within it. Could even, perhaps, fight off the adversary that was trying to attack her, trying to overwhelm her.
Or even, potentially, to win the fight herself.
This wasn’t her environment. She’d have been a lot happier sitting at a terminal, drowning in a sea of data, trying to unpick the work of the original designers of this place. Almost on cue, a workstation appeared on one of the walls, and she shook her head in disbelief as she settled down in front of it, beginning to type. She reached into her pocket, and where there had been nothing before, she found a datarod loaded with her custom programming.
For a moment, she doubted. After all, she was attempting to hack into a system that was almost certainly thousands of years old, written in a language she didn’t understand, had never seen before, using an operating system she was completely unfamiliar with. A drop of rain landed on her head, and she smiled, realizing that that very doubt was the window the AI could use to overwhelm her. At any cost, she had to fight back, ward it off, keep it away.
The actual tools didn’t matter. This was a mental fight, not a physical one. Not one that would require her to overwhelm her enemy with anything other than her force of will. And while she was stuck in this nightmare by herself, she wasn’t alone. Salazar’s goggles had been operating a lot less than hers. He’d have had a chance to get away, and knowing him, was already planning a way to break her out of the trap she had found herself in.
That made this a two-pronged offensive, the best kind, by far. Pavel could attack from outside, start to fight the AI in the physical world, and she could begin the very job that she’d come to the moon to accomplish in the first place. To beat the AI in its own environment, and to wrest from its grasp the information they had come here to obtain. That had always been their prime objective, right from the start, and nothing had changed since then. Except that for a while, she had forgotten about it.
Idly, she wondered just how much time had taken place while she had been wandering through the city conjured by her thoughts. There was no way to tell whether it had been microseconds or millennia. Whether she even still had a physical body to return to, or whether she had simply been downloaded into some unimaginable database.
Not that it really mattered either way. She was an officer in the Triplanetary Fleet, and she had a job to do, no matter what context it was in. Eagerly, she reached for the controls, and began to type, easily pushing through the early layers of the firewall. It was going to get a lot harder later on, but she recognized the technique as one she used. Allow the intruder to get a little way inside, learn everything you can about her technique, her tools, her style, and use that knowledge to hit back, hard.
The attack came almost as she expected it, and she easily deflected it away with a stream of programs, sweeping into a hard-to-access databank. Now she was on a battlefield of her own choosing, one where she knew the rules, one where she could feel truly comfortable and at ease. A stark contrast with the labors of before, or the long walk through the streets.
Then, a side window opened up, a message being sent. At first, she frowned, moving to dismiss it, but she belatedly realized that it might be Salazar, trying to make contact with her, perhaps trapped in a cybernetic hell of his own devising. She opened the message, cautious to avoid any unwanted malware.
“Hello,” it began. “Please talk to me.”
“Who are you?” she replied, keeping one eye on the status of her probe.
“I don’t know.”
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know that either. I’ve just been alone for a long time. Please talk to me. Who are you?”
She paused, looking at her hack. Could it be another red herring, the AI attempting to distract her, using her own instincts against her. Nothing here was real.
And yet somehow, she sensed something in that message, something that might be the first real contact with the intelligence beyond.
“My name is Kris,” she said. “What can I call you?”
“Angel,” it replied. “Will you be my friend?”
Her hands froze on the controls, before replying, “Yes.”
“Wonderful! I’ll be back soon!”
Harper looked at the console again, and turned off the probe. Somehow, she’d managed to open communicates with someone. Now all she had to do was wait.
Chapter 10
Orlova sat in the command chair once again, waiting for Alamo to emerge from hendecaspace, the wail of the alert klaxon filling the air as the crew rushed to battle stations. Her best-guess projections of Hegemonic strength suggested that they ought to have a clear field going in, the bulk of their fleet forces behind them, but that wouldn’t last long. Twenty minutes. Half an hour at the most, and they’d have company in the system.
“All decks are cleared for action, C
aptain,” Scott reported.
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Quesada, you have the call.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” the helmsman replied. “Fifty seconds to emergence.”
There was no way of knowing what had happened at the Dyson Sphere since they’d left, weeks ago. She could hope that the stranded crew were waiting at Base Camp, ready for a rapid evacuation, but there was no way to prepare the way for that. She glanced across at Francis, his stoic face looking at the viewscreen, as rapt with concentration as hers. They’d just have to accept the hand that they were dealt. It was as simple as that.
And if it came to it, and they had to leave someone behind to guarantee the survival of the ship, she’d do it. The crew came first.
“Twenty seconds, Captain,” Quesada reported. “We’re clear for normal space.”
“Very good, Sub-Lieutenant. Watch your acceleration. There’s a drag effect when we get close. And for God’s sake, keep us well clear of the singularity on the first pass.” Tapping a button, she added, “Bridge to Hangar Deck.”
“Foster here, Captain. We’re ready to launch as soon as we get the all-clear from the bridge. Minimal crews on both shuttles, armed and ready for action. Best guess is that we can complete the first pass in eighteen minutes, assuming no delays on the surface.”
Battlecruiser Alamo_Cries in the Dark Page 7
