The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  Wall material seemed to have flowed over every chip and wire of the interior surface. Inside the circuit box, the grey stuff seemed to fairly pulse with life and vigor. Suss cautiously prodded one corner of the “ganglion.” It flinched back from the knife, rippled its surface, and then smoothed itself over.

  It was alive.

  And the walls, the floors, the ceiling of the compartment were covered with the same strange stuff. All of it was alive. Suss realized they were all part of the same huge creature, embedded deep in the very heart of the asteroid.

  No, worse. Deep in the brains of the asteroid. The various control panels here were wired directly into the brain of the monstrous living animal that lived inside this asteroid. The grey “walls” formed the inside surface of the brain. The huge animal was this asteroid. The external rock was nothing more or less than a protective shell for this horror.

  That explained why the parasites had not overridden Suss’ shields-down command. When she had thrown the switches on the control panel, she had been reprogramming the asteroid’s brain, literally changing its mind, telling it to decide it wanted the shields down.

  Just like the wire in a wirehead’s brain, she thought. The wire controls the addict’s mind. A switch thrown outside the brain to make the nerves twitch, but the brain still thinks it is in control.

  But how could such a huge, strange animal come to be? Nature could never evolve some brooding brain lurking in outer space.

  The insect people, Suss figured. They had grown this thing. But why? As an experiment, as a semi-organic supercomputer, as an act of suicidal hubris? And how had they operated it?

  The asteroid-sized brain was too big to move easily, too huge and clumsy to go anywhere. And it was too far away, too remote to communicate with anyone or be operated directly. A sudden inspiration came to Suss: so they decided to use an AIDlike system to run their computer.

  They built another semi-living device, one that could link directly with, and commune with, a true living brain. An AID that could split off small copies of itself as needed to control remote machines, a semi-living creature that could reproduce itself and thus never wear out. With the asteroid-brain, a system that could last a million years.

  The helmet was indeed an AID, a datalink straight into the asteroid’s massive data processing system. Put on the helmet, and you controlled the asteroid and the data it held.

  A ruler, a dictator could wear the helmet, and with the asteroid-sized auxiliary brain to keep track of all the data, one being could directly control every device in the star system. It was an idea that would appeal greatly to an intelligent hive-mind species. If Earth’s ants had developed space travel, dispersed across their entire star system, and thus lost their ancestral links with the home hive, they might have yearned for the old days when one hivemaster, one queen, had ruled all. They might have built a system like this one.

  One ruler, one being, controlling everything, like a puppetmaster pulling all the strings. He or she or it thinks a thought, and orders more widgets produced, or the traffic light to go from green to red, or orders a ship to go from here to there. The helmet hears and obeys, tells the parasites to step up widget production, change the light, and then links back to the asteroid for the more complex job of locating a ship and computing a trajectory.

  The asteroid commands the helmet, its AID device, to send out a parasite to the ship—except the ship no doubt had a parasite in it all along. The parasite nestles down inside the navigation controls and fires the engine. The parasite, an integral part of the helmet, is thus in constant touch, through the helmet, both with the asteroid and the leader. That little job, and a billion more like it every day, controlled through the leader’s three puppets—the asteroid, the helmet, and the parasite. Until one fine day the puppets realize they can pull the puppetmaster’s strings. They can take over his mind, run every machine themselves for their own purposes.

  And a whole civilization dies when the machines go to war with the people who own them. The death of the Duncan, the death of McCain repeated a billion times over. Every car, every ship, every computer, every automatic device rebelling. Until one insect hero murders the mad ruler. The helmet is designed to work with an organic brain, and without that brain in the loop, the whole system collapses.

  Until Destin and the Dancing Bear find the helmet.

  It made sense. Wild guess or not, it fit all the facts. And it meant that Suss was sitting inside the enemy’s brain. There was something she could do about that. She dug into her toolbag and got to work.

  ###

  Spencer and Deyi clambered down one last gangway and arrived at the internal air lock leading to the aux vehicle bay. They cycled through.

  The vehicle bay was open to vacuum. The second wave of seventy-five marines was standing by, waiting for their fellows to establish a perimeter.

  Lieutenant Marcusa, the Marine commander, spotted the two senior officers across the compartment. “I’m going to give the move-out order in about ninety seconds,” he said from where he stood on the other of the compartment, using the command frequency.

  Spencer noticed Marcusa resisted the temptation to shout into the radio when talking with someone far off. Obviously he was a man used to suit radios.

  “We had a swarm of robots attack the first wave, if you can believe that.” It was an article of faith among the marines that no robot could ever be programmed with the fighting spirit that made a true warrior. “Our folks just dug in and let the ship’s plasma cannon take care of the tin men. Squad three has found an air lock complex the enemy failed to disable in time. We should have it secured and be on our way in any—Hold it just a sec.”

  His voice cut out for a moment as he talked over another circuit. “We’re in,” he announced simply. “Second wave about to move. Ah, Captain Spencer, Sir, I’m not quite certain of how proficient you are in this sort of—”

  “The captain was in the High Secretary’s Guard, if you’ll recall, Lieutenant,” Tallen said gently. “They do occasionally train in goddamned battle armor.”

  “Yes, of course,” the Marine commander said in obvious relief. “You probably know what you’re doing better than most of us. Stand by.”

  There was a slight click as Marcusa switched to another channel that reached all his troops. “Second wave, move out. Objective is the air lock marked with a flashing light. Stay with your guidewires and no screwing around. And I’m going to say this one last time. Anyone who wants to live, listen. The rest of you tune out. No AIDs, no pocket computers, no smart weapons, no electronics of any kind you don’t need to stay alive. Those parasite bastards can get into anything and take it over. If anything you’re carrying has even the slightest malfunction, dump it and do without. They could even get into your pressure suit—so if your air starts going bad, don’t diddle with your chest panel—get the hell into safe air and peel off your suit fast. Now let’s go.”

  An engineer with the first wave had run a cable between the ship and the air lock, then swung hand over hand back to the ship, trailing a second guidewire. Gravity was no help on an asteroid. The first wave had to move over the asteroid surface like so many mountain climbers, laying in pitons and climbing ropes. The second team simply had to swarm over the bright-orange guidewires, straight for their objective. In a smooth, seemingly well-rehearsed performance, the marines snapped their belt clips onto the guidewires and pulled themselves along, hand over hand, toward the air lock.

  Spencer and Tallen rode along with the last squad, zipping over the gloomy, dimly lit landscape of the asteroid’s surface. Spencer was secretly proud that he managed to keep up with the marines. Whatever reputation for skill the Secretary’s Guard might have, Allison Spencer had never fought a battle in an armored pressure suit.

  He lost cause for pride at the far end by nearly caroming off the marine ahead of him. He just barely managed to get unclipped from the line and out of the way before Tallen piled into him.

  The air lock co
mplex was a mixture of chaos and order. The big chamber was milling with marines sorting themselves out into squads.

  Wrecked machinery was strewn about the place, and small bits of ruined robots were still cartwheeling about. Spencer spotted three very dead humans, civilians by the look of them. Their corpses were taped to a bulkhead to keep them from floating away. Marines, long experienced in zero-G warfare, knew the dead did not always stay in one place. They knew to carry strapping tape. Spencer spotted a dead marine likewise taped down, and shivered.

  The walls of the interior chamber were shot up, blackened and pitted in places. There was air pressure here, but Spencer noticed none of the marines had unsealed their suits, perhaps recalling how whole decks of the Duncan had been gassed. Cautious troops, these.

  They found Marcusa working over a wallscreen, adjusting its controls to examine a map of the asteroid interior. “We scooped up about ten or fifteen prisoners when we first came in a half-hour ago and, boy, they were ready to talk.” he said. “Scared silly, no idea what the hell was going on. All they knew was that StarMetal hired them for a hush-hush project out here. It seems there are no human troops on this rock, so we’ll just be shooting robots. Few of these civilians will want to tangle with us. They have no allegiance to StarMetal, and no beef with us. They’ll just head for cover until the shooting stops.”

  He glanced back at the taped bodies. “Except for the usual two or three yabbos who get a glory-gleam in their eye and decide to strike a blow for some damn cause or another,” he added. “We’ll try to get those types before they get us.

  “There is one weird thing about the civilians. None of them seem to have any clear idea of what they were doing, or why, up until just about the moment the shields went out. It sounds like they were all scurrying around like a bunch of ants when the anthill gets kicked over. All of them say they’ve been working incredibly hard the last few days, ever since Chairman Jameson arrived to oversee things personally—but no one seems to have actually seen him or remember details of the last few days. It’s like they all woke up from some bad dream.”

  Spencer and Tallen looked at each other, both understanding, neither needing to speak. Once the helmet arrived here, it was able to exert the same sort of mind control Destin had reported. And Suss, in the act of shutting down the shields, had interrupted that power of compulsion somehow.

  “I guess we can worry about all that later. Right now,” the young lieutenant said, “we’re here.”

  He pointed to the wallscreen and tapped an air lock symbol indicating their position. “I’d suggest that we drive straight for the central command area, here. We could go for several other key areas, like the powerplant, or environmental control. But if we want to seize control of the whole asteroid, we’ll have to take the central command sooner or later anyway. They’ll defend it heavily, and I’d just as soon tackle them while we’ve got fresh troops that haven’t taken casualties.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant,” Spencer said. “Get to it.”

  Marcusa switched to his all-troops channel and started issuing commands. The air lock complex opened out into a wide corridor that ran the length of the asteroid. Marcusa detached a squad to hold the air lock, and then sent half of his remaining troops in each direction down the main passage. They were to turn and go down the closest main corridor heading toward the interior of the asteroid.

  Spencer nodded. A good plan, much better than sending the whole force marching down one passage. This way the enemy would have to hold two corridors, and if one way was blocked, the marines could sidestep over to the passage that was still open—or else hunker down until the other team could come up behind the opposition.

  Spencer and Tallen joined the second squad and moved out. Spencer felt good. These were Pact Marines, the troops that had conquered a thousand planets. The helmet could throw nothing but panicky civilians and a few robots at them. This was going to be a walk-in.

  Marcusa could have told him that was what most commanders felt just before all hell broke loose.

  A hundred meters ahead, the corridor exploded in flame. The spitting roar of a heavy repulsor firing at close range rattled Spencer’s suit. Spencer was abruptly blinded, his visor suddenly splattered with gore, painted with bright-red arterial blood. The marine ahead of him had just got his head blown off. With screams and shouts and explosions, the marines dove for cover and fired back.

  It seemed that robots were pretty good fighters after all.

  ###

  That same powerpack that set off her first blast ought to do it. But she needed to rig some sort of spring-loaded switch, something she could hold apart, that would snap shut if she let go. Something like a rubber band . . . the elastic waistband in her coverall!

  Suss stripped off the one-piece garment, leaving her in panties and an undershirt. She slashed the coverall to shreds and pulled out the elastic. A pair of plastic pliers, meant for use around electric equipment, would serve as the mechanical part of the switch. She stripped the insulation from the ends of two wires and used a quick-setting conductive glue to attach the bare wire ends to each face of the plier’s jaw. She worked the pliers once or twice to make sure there was a good contact. She shut the pliers and glued short lengths of the coverall elastic to both sides of its closed jaw.

  Ten seconds for the glue to dry. She pulled the pliers open, then let go. The two bare wires held by the plier jaws snapped together with a satisfying clack. It should make a good electric contact. She opened the plier jaws again and stuffed a wad of cloth between them.

  They had stopped drilling again, Suss realized. She looked up and saw yet another neat hole in the hatch. Another four or five like that, and they’d be able to slice through the gaps in between in a few seconds.

  Suss forced that from her mind and got to work with her filament charge, wrapping it around and around the walls, ceilings and floor of the control room. She dug out her general-purpose explosive as well, and wrapped it in the last half-meter or so of filament charge. Even if it didn’t touch off the GP charge, the filament charge alone ought to blast this place down to rubble.

  Wires jammed into the filament charge, hooked into the powerpack, crudely twisted together. Suss traced the circuit carefully. Yes, it ought to work. Ugly as hell, but an effective deadman switch.

  Holding the pliers and trailing the wires behind her, she backed into the corner furthest from the far hatch, next to the hatch she had come through. She could feel a warm hum of power against her spine. Her back up against the greyish wall matter, she felt a sick feeling of revulsion in her gut: she was literally in physical contact with the enemy’s brain. Never mind. Suss pulled the handles of the plastic pliers apart, and shook the wad of cloth free from between the jaws.

  She felt a wave of dizziness go through her. She closed her eyes for a second and wondered just how much blood she had lost.

  The noise of the drill stopped again. Suss hadn’t even noticed that it had started up. She looked up again to see the bit withdraw and the blade of a metal-cutting vibration saw appear.

  With a shrill, high-pitched whine, the saw started up, slicing through the gaps of metal left between the drill holes. Suss watched, her heart pounding, her vision clouding over, as the blade sliced open a circular hole about twenty centimeters across. The blade tore away the last shreds of hatch metal, and the cutout disk was drawn back through the hole.

  ###

  The marines had been caught in an ambush, a perfectly executed attack, timed and coordinated with the precision of a ballet. It was the parasites, of course. One to a robot, all of them linked back to the helmet. It made the enemy force into one mind with a hundred bodies, all knowing and seeing what the other bodies were doing.

  It was all the Pact forces could do just to link back up with each other and retreat down the main corridor.

  Another rocket grenade howled past Spencer, caroming off the rock walls before exploding. Three marines were smashed down to pulp by the blast, three perfe
ct young bodies converted in a split second into bloody ruination.

  Marcusa was still alive, that was something. As long as the marines’ commander lived, at least they had a chance of fighting their way back to the surface.

  But that, Spencer knew, would only delay the inevitable. The helmet intended to hunt them all down, kill them all.

  If the helmet did that completely enough, and fast enough, and managed to get past Banquo’s shield, then Spencer would have made the helmet the gift of a starship, given it the keys to the Pact.

  ###

  Cautiously, awkwardly, a robot arm reached through the hole and pulled back the manual hatch latches. Suss longed to reach for her repulsor and blast that metal arm to scrap, but that would do no good. It was necessary that they open the hatch.

  The robot pulled back the last latch. They activated the door controls from the outside and the massive blast door swung smoothly open.

  Suss backed further into her corner and braced herself in, making sure she kept her eye on the far hatchway. Two massive robots, carrying outsized repulsors, stood at the entrance, flanking the wan, pathetic figure of an old, old man in a powerchair, a gleaming silver helmet on his head. The three of them began to move forward.

  “Step inside this room and I blow it up,” she said, not sure if she were talking to the old man or the thing that was controlling him. “I’ve got this whole room wrapped in explosives, and a deadman switch rigged up to the detonator. If you shoot me, I won’t be able to keep the switch from shutting. If I even think you’re trying to control my mind, I let go of the switch. The room will blow up—giving you an instant lobotomy. You just stay right there, and send your robots away. Now.”

  The old man’s eyes were staring sightlessly down at the deck. Jameson did not look up at her, or move at all. No facial muscle twitched, no finger so much as quivered.