The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  There were too many questions, but they all came down to one decision. Should he follow through on his promise to launch, or ignore the orders that came from either a mere captain’s tart or a machine?

  Shoemaker wanted desperately to pass the buck on this one, hand it back up the line to a senior officer—but they were plenty busy handling the ship, and besides, they had provided implicit approval by accepting the priority-three call and passing it on to him in auxiliary vehicles. What did they think anyone would want from aux-vee? Chicken soup?

  No, the bridge comm officer must have known what the request would be—and must have cleared it through the acting commanding officer, Executive Officer Chu. Regs were very clear on that point. Which boiled down to the request for a gig launch being an order from the XO.

  And that was good enough for Shoemaker.

  He stood up, stepped to a command panel, and told the gig’s AID to run a prelaunch checklist, then stepped down the hall to the ready room. His flight suit was there. He would fly this run himself.

  ###

  “Commander! The aux vehicle hatch is opening.” The engineering officer hit the reset and checked her status board again, just in case it was an error. The light stayed on. “Hatch opening confirmed. I show the captain’s gig boosting away on an external monitor.”

  Commander Tarwa Chu swore violently. They were five minutes from launch. Five more minutes, and it wouldn’t matter. She forced herself to calm down and speak in a steady voice. “Is it a parasite, or did one of the crew do it for some damn fool reason?”

  “Ah, Commander,” Lieutenant Peroni said, more than a bit hesitantly. “One of the crew members on the beach radioed in a few minutes ago, priority three and requesting a patch through to aux vehicles. It was a woman’s voice, not the captain. The contact came through an AID showing all the proper security checks. That person must have requested the gig.”

  “Thank you, Peroni, for that up-to-date report,” Tarwa said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. Suss! It had to be Suss. No one else on the ship realized she was more than the captain’s bedmate, but Tarwa knew—and knew a KT agent wouldn’t request assistance without good reason.

  If Peroni had followed procedure, Tarwa knew she would probably have granted the KT agent’s request. Except that would have required ignoring the captain’s order to keep the ship buttoned up. Oh, hell. What difference could opening one hatch make?

  “Very well, Peroni, the damage is done. But if anything goes wrong because of this—it’s coming out of your pay. Steady as she goes, and stand by for boost.”

  ###

  “My God, those bastards can move fast!” Wellingham watched his monitors in horror as the five parasites riding the hull made beelines for an open hatch. Wellingham looked again at his repeater board. Open hatch! What damn fool had unbuttoned the ship? Too late now.

  He watched his G-wave display in despair. Good God, those nightmares were moving ten times faster than he had thought they could. Maybe they could spring for short distances when they needed to—or maybe they had deliberately let him think they were slow, waiting for a chance like this.

  He had no way of stopping them, could do nothing more than watch as they homed in on the open way into the ship. The aux launch hatch was open for all of perhaps sixty seconds.

  But that was time for four of the parasites to get aboard.

  ###

  Jameson leered at them from his powerchair, a giggling death’s head. Captain Allison Spencer watched in horror as the silvery parasites slithered endlessly up and down Jameson’s body, crawling over his neck and scalp to merge with the helmet, even as new parasite droplets broke off from the helmet and eased down his body to the floor, off on unknowable errands.

  This was the boy wonder who had turned StarMetal around? This decaying old lunatic? Obviously the helmet and the parasites had done this to him, somehow. But why? For what purpose?

  Jameson put his hands on the armrests of the chair and pushed himself up to a standing position. He stood there, leaning against the arm of the chair for a moment, a sick old man.

  “I’m feeling quite a bit better this morning,” he announced, apropos of nothing.

  He let go of the chair and stood erect on his own, though it was obviously an effort to do so. He patted the thing on his head—skullcap, helmet, machine, creature, whatever the hell it was. “It fits better now, you know. I believe that it has settled down onto my head a bit more.”

  The crazed old man looked up at Spencer, then at Sisley, and giggled. “But I didn’t invite you up here to talk about my taste in hats, now did I?” he asked with a crafty grin. “You’re here looking for our friend Destin, aren’t you?”

  Sisley gasped, and Spencer fought to keep himself from reacting as well. They could not give away more than the enemy already knew.

  “No need to hide it. One of my little friends was there, he heard it.” Jameson patted one of the parasites sliding up his chest toward his head. “All my little friends are so helpful. They tell me so much . . .”

  Jameson seemed to get lost for a moment, staring at the things crawling on his chest. With a start he came to himself, blinked and looked up. “What was it—oh, yes, Destin. You may search all you like for him, but a fat lot of good it will do you. You won’t find him. No one will. He’s not where he’s supposed to be!” James opened his mouth in a silent, horrible parody of laughter.

  Spencer got up off his knees and levered himself into a seated position on the couch, and nodded to Sisley to do the same. Their hands were still tied behind their backs, making it difficult to sit comfortably, but anything was better than crouching naked on the floor in front of this madman. More importantly, Spencer needed to keep Jameson talking, kid him along, and he wanted to look as normal as possible, set the madman at his ease. A tough job when hog-tied in the nude.

  Spencer knew his own future didn’t look very bright at the moment, but there was a reasonable outside chance that his AID would pick up anything that was said, and get a chance to transmit it later.

  No doubt this room was pretty well shielded against most radio—but they’d have to take Spencer’s AID out of here sometime. They might be careless about it, forget to hit the AID’s scram button, or fail to shield the AID against radio. It was a long shot, but there was no harm in trying. And there was a hell of a lot that they needed to find out. Spencer still didn’t know anything about this helmet-thing or its parasites.

  Besides, Spencer couldn’t exactly see how their situation could get any worse.

  “You’re right, Mr. Jameson,” he said. “We’ll never find him. Not now. It’s a pity, because I really wanted to meet him, find out what sort of man he was.”

  “Oh, a bright young man, a very clever young man. He was smart enough to bring the helmet directly to me, not bother with any middlemen. But of course Destin never knew how valuable it was. Would you like to see how he found it?”

  Found it? Spencer wondered. That was a decidedly strange choice of words. Spencer didn’t even know what he thought about the parasites so far, but they didn’t seem like something you found.

  Spencer knew so little that he hadn’t even developed a theory about the things yet. But, deep down, he realized he had assumed they were some sort of vanguard to invasion from some super-race outside the Pact. But if they were found—maybe they were animals, after all.

  “Yes, Sir, I’d very much like to see,” Spencer replied, trying to sound like a respectful young visitor invited to look at vacation pictures. No drama, no pleading, no overeagerness, he told himself. Just try and make this seem like a normal conversation for the old man. And remember how easy it was to set off a wirehead’s paranoia.

  “I really shouldn’t, of course—but what harm can it do now—and it’s such an interesting recording. The computers have enhanced it a bit, of course, but it shows it just the way it really was, truly it does.”

  Jameson started to walk across the room, but his knees began to buckle before
he could complete a single step. His powerchair was behind him in a minute, maneuvering itself into position, raising its armrests a bit to offer him something to lean on. The chair eased its occupant into place.

  “Oh, dear,” Jameson said wearily. “I’m not quite as spry today as I thought I was. But never mind.”

  The chair turned smartly and carried Jameson toward a desk in the corner. Jameson’s hands were out of sight, and Spencer could not tell if he was operating some sort of control, or if instead the chair was guiding itself. Probably the latter, under the helmet’s control somehow. Maybe under some sort of gravity control akin to the G-wave technique the parasites used.

  Jameson started digging through the debris that littered the desk. Finally he found the record block he was after and slipped it into the player on the desk. The wall screen showing a view from space went blank for a moment, and then came back to life, showing the approach to an asteroid from a shipborne camera.

  “The asteroid didn’t look like much at first, did it?” Jameson asked. “Just one more rock among the millions in the asteroid belt. But Destin—well, his deep-echo scan showed something very strange. The asteroid was much less dense than rock. Destin thought it might be an old, crusted-over comet filled with organics or water ice. They’re both worth a lot out in the Belt. So he started drilling in, clever boy!”

  The camera view shifted to a view on the surface, then jumped around from camera to camera, as the recording computer shifted from one view to another, noting the most significant views as the work progressed. A lot of the shots seemed to be from helmet cameras, mounted on the pressure suits of the workers.

  Time snapped forward as the computer skipped over redundant shots and used time-lapse sampling to speed up the action. A drilling rig sprouted up on the surface. Tiny suited figures scuttled over the machinery and made it ready. The drill started working, and a set of progress meters appeared on the screen in overlay, indicating the strength of the rock, drill speed, and core depth. Spencer was not surprised that Destin had recorded his operation in such detail—both the insurance companies and the claim settlement laws required constant monitoring of prospecting operations. No doubt far more data had been required and then edited out of this record.

  The numbers on the drill depth meter moved quickly, and then stopped abruptly. “This is where they struck the hollow,” James said excitedly. “This is the best part.”

  There was a shot of the prospectors rigging a camera onto a probe, and then the view shifted to the probe camera as it dropped down the drill hole. Spencer watched as the camera traveled down into the shaft. Something deep inside him knew that Sisley and he were about to see something of surpassing strangeness. There was a weakness in his gut, some primal fear of the unknown asserting itself.

  The camera swooped down the drill hole, hurtling downward as the computer speeded up the camera. The rock wall streaked past, lit by the blazing camera light on the probe.

  At the bottom of the screen image, the depth gauge numbers reappeared, the maximum depth achieved by the drill on one side, the current depth of the probe on the other. The probe slowed as it reached the drill’s maximum depth. At the base of the drill hole was not more rock, but blackness, a darkened cavity.

  The probe moved downward into the darkness, moving carefully, cautiously, almost daintily.

  And discovered the unbelievable.

  There was no natural hollow, no ice cavern or gas pocket at the bottom of the drill hole.

  There was a control center, a sophisticated operations room more ancient than the pyramids of Egypt.

  Age, incredible age, seemed to hang on every surface of the place. The probe camera twisted and turned, and deployed additional off-axis lights or extensor arms to improve the seeing. Spencer was glad of that—it was hard enough to interpret the view without having to contend with harsh straight-on spotlighting.

  For what he was seeing ought to have been impossible. Spencer could not tell walls from ceiling or floors, if indeed there were any such distinctions to be made. Oddly made chairs, work platforms, control panels, and other, unidentifiable—call them artifacts for want of a better word—sprouted from every surface, without any planning that Spencer could see.

  Some of the artifacts seemed shiny, bright and new. Others, made of different materials not quite so resistant to aging, were blackened, pitted, corroded. Dust clumps seemed to have cemented themselves to most of the flat surfaces. This place had been left undisturbed for a long enough time that molecular bonding had taken place, the dust in effect melting into the surfaces it found itself on. The walls, floors and ceiling were shiny-new, though, a softly gleaming grey.

  The camera swooped and dove, its operators no doubt as stunned as Spencer was now. There was no record, no hint, no clue of a spacefaring culture of such antiquity anywhere inside the Pact. Who had built this place? For what purpose? And how long ago?

  Spencer had scarcely formed the questions in his mind when part of the answer appeared before his eyes.

  The camera swung around to view the far end of the chamber. It focused on the mummified remains of two many-legged, exoskeletal creatures, looking like dried-out locusts grown large.

  These were mere husks. Both wore equipment belts as well as gadgetry that seemed to be attached directly to their exoskeletons. They had large, well-formed heads with faceted eyes and complex sensory and articulation clusters about their mouths. Their long-dead faces, unreadable, insectoid, still seemed to Spencer able to speak of something.

  Of madness, of fear, of desperation.

  Spencer looked closer, trying to understand. One mummy seemed to be holding a weapon of some sort—and the other was wearing Jameson’s helmet. Spencer glanced from the screen to Jameson. Yes, the helm had changed its shape somehow, but there was no mistaking that thing, no matter what sort of head it sat on.

  Spencer looked again at the two long-dead corpses on screen. Both of the creatures had fist-sized holes blasted through their chest carapaces—they had been shot, Spencer realized, probably by that weapon one of them held. The creature with the gun must have shot the helmet wearer, and then himself . . .

  The image on the screen froze, and then faded out. Jameson turned about to face his prisoners, giggling madly. “Isn’t it a wonderful thing?” he asked. “The captain found it, and brought it straight to me—and now I can use it to set things right! With this helmet, I can control everything, not just some fiddling little company on Daltgeld. Within a week, I will rule this entire system!”

  Jameson’s eyes grew brighter, and his slack-jawed face suddenly became animated. “Then—oh, yes, then! Out of this system, out into the Pact. My little friends will travel across the starlanes, taking over ships, computers, all sorts of automated systems. And then I shall turn the tables on them all, Haiken Maru and all the rest. Soon Haiken Maru will be crawling to StarMetal, to me, begging me for help and protection. And then—and then, why the High Secretary is dead, is he not? And the succession still in doubt? Even if a new secretary is chosen soon, he will be weak for a long time to come, consolidating his forces. What better time for a new force, a new man to come forward? The Pact will be mine, and the boundless stars beyond!”

  Jameson’s breath came fast and wheezy, and the blush of color in his face faded away to ashen greyness.

  Megalomania, Spencer thought. A classic aspect of wirehead behavior. The helmet had taken the poor man’s mind, that was clear. Even with the helmet, it was impossible that Jameson could conquer the Pact. No one man could smash the entire Navy.

  The question was could the helmet conquer? Spencer had no doubt that the helmet was master, and Jameson the slave. For whatever reason, the helmet must need a brain to control before it could operate.

  That poor insectoid bastard with the gun must have known that, and killed himself to keep the helmet from grabbing his mind after killing the creature wearing the helmet.

  Now the helmet had Jameson’s brain. To use as what? A power so
urce? A feedback generator? A databank and interpreter, teaching the helmet who ran the universe and how these days? Was the helmet indeed merely a strange and powerful computer—or some strange form of life, either natural-occurring or hell-raised by some hapless lifeform that should have known better? Perhaps brought to being by the insectoid race Destin had found. Or were the insectoids merely its most recent victim? How far back in space and time did it all go?

  Spencer forced himself to think about more current problems. He didn’t need to understand the psychology or programming of an alien, machine or animal, to recognize Jameson’s situation. A wirehead needed no urging to succumb to megalomania. That feeling of power, of infinite well-being rushing through you. Spencer knew that false sense of omnipotence all too well.

  How much stronger would that feeling be when the stimulator was an intelligent parasite, deliberately manipulating the pleasure doses to control its host, its victim?

  Spencer felt a dull knot of pain at the base of his skull, felt the scar there seem to throb with remembered torment. He knew something else about the psychology of the wirehead—the inevitable feeling of loss, of despair, the knowledge of your own real weakness, when you came down from that surging sense of imagined power. That was the moment when the victim was closest to reality, the moment when he could be reached if he could be reached at all.

  And by the look on Jameson’s face now, that moment of loss and despair was upon him. Any moment now, the helmet would judge that its victim was straying too far from control and give him another dose of pleasure.

  But it could not act too fast. It had to know that. It had to know that it had to delay at least a little while, or risk destroying its victim altogether. Too much stimulation, and Jameson could suffer a fatal stroke or heart attack, leaving him as useless a husk as those mummified insect-creatures inside the asteroid.