by M. D. Cooper
She cursed, knowing she should have seen this happening. He had been distracting her. His communication streams created access points, and she followed him into the command structure. Abruptly, the Resolute Charity’s navigation, communications and defense systems were open to her. She cast around for Fiona or Diane, thinking she could wake one of them to distract Xander, but it was already too late.
The ship’s attack systems were in the midst of executing a simple command. Every weapon available to the Resolute Charity fired on Proteus. Missiles, rail gun, x-ray emitter and attack drones filled the space between the ship and the moon.
Lyssa watched in horror as the attack executed. If Alexander didn’t have some kind of defense system, he was about to die.
In a last effort, she directed her energy to the communications array and broadcast a message toward Proteus. What could she say? Did it matter if Alexander knew that she hadn’t been the agent of his destruction? But she had.
She had made all this possible. And now the moon was going to be destroyed. All the AIs who had come here seeking freedom were going to die. It was all ironic and terrible and she didn’t know how to fix it.
She finally understood how Brit had felt when she’d stood in the Heartbridge clinics, seeing labs full of children used in experiments. Lyssa was helpless.
The first rail gun round struck Proteus, followed by the first barrage of missiles. Then another and another.
The surface of the moon turned molten as whole terrain features exploded, collapsed, and the debris fields started to burn, concussive ripples sending waves across the surface. Proteus glowed red against the blue light of Neptune as whatever trap had been set finally burned itself to death.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
STELLAR DATE: 11.22.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Psion Research Outpost
REGION: Larissa, Neptune, OuterSol
Andy and Harl maintained security as Fugia poked at the airlock’s control system. The only sounds Andy heard were his breathing inside the helmet and Fugia grumbling across their local comms net. The gravity was light enough that his rifle felt like a stick in his hands.
Andy kept his gaze on the surrounding hills, sorting among the cracks in the rock for anything resembling an overwatch weapons emplacement. He couldn’t believe someone would go to the trouble of building a station here without putting defenses in place.
He expected at any moment for a hatch hidden beneath the dust to slide open and reveal a stack of point defense cannons ready to cut them to shreds.
Harl adjusted his machine gun and trained the barrel on the door, the checked his stance again and stepped to the side so he wasn’t directly in front of the door. Andy did the same, moving about ten meters away so he could keep an eye on the surrounding area as the airlock opened.
Fugia tapped the control and put her hands on her hips. At first nothing seemed to be happening. Then the door split down the middle and the two sides slid into the bulkhead.
Harl inspected the interior of the airlock, which appeared to be empty and clean from what Andy could see. The big man stepped inside. Fugia closed the outer doors and cycled the lock.
Andy acknowledged and patted his own pulse pistol on his hip, worried for a minute that he’d forgotten it back on Sunny Skies.
In an overly calm voice, Harl said,
Andy bounded across the distance to the door.
In another minute, Andy was inside with the pulse pistol ready in his hands. The interior door slid open on a tube-shaped room where Harl stood over the black body of a spider-like drone. Harl glanced at him as he approached.
he said.
Harl shrugged.
Andy thought Harl looked more like the cat standing over a dead mouse but kept that to himself. Inspecting the drone’s body, Andy saw two dents that looked like pulse fire, but what had killed it was a boot-shaped crater in its upper dome.
Fugia grunted. She didn’t sound enthusiastic, but replied,
Andy looked around as Fugia cycled the airlock. The entrance was full of old storage containers and had a desk to one side with a terminal that looked dead. As soon as Fugia came in, she went straight to the computer and futzed with it until she had a boot-up screen.
Harl looked irritated by the possibility but took up a ready stance near the bulkhead hatch leading deeper inside the structure.
Andy took the opportunity to call back to Fran and check on Sunny Skies.
Fran shrugged.
Xander was going to disappear without answering their questions. Unless Lyssa had information that they didn’t.
shaking his head.
Fran laughed.
Fugia gave a shout of triumph and stepped back from the terminal wiggling her hips in a dance made awkward by her suit.
She waved a hand at the terminal.
Andy nodded. There had to be some significance to when the facility was abandoned but they couldn’t look at that now.
Andy nodded. He glanced from Fugia to Harl.
Harl led the way through the interior hatch. On the other side they found another corridor, this one without windows, with branching sections that led off into work areas. This area looked like a transition zone where cargo was processed from the exterior storage areas to the interior. Rooms were stacked with empty crates, while others had tools scattered on benches. The next section was a locker room with showers and toilets, everything covered in a light dust of disuse.
While the Psion logo appeared on many generic things like worksuits and shipping containers, with ‘Enfield Scientific’ visible on other items as well. The logos had a jaunty tilt that irritated him, as if they were selling exercise equipment rather than developing world-breaking artificial intelligence.
Fugia couldn’t keep her hands off things and kept picking up data terminals, pulling open lockers and poking her head inside closets. Andy warned her once, worried she might activate a booby trap. When she did it for the third time, he stopped trying. She was like a kid in a toy store.
They passed through living quarters and then went down a level into what became administrative areas. Rooms filled with data terminals indicated massive numbers of workers monitoring a remote site. One room had a giant map on the bulkhead, which showed their location and then the exterior entrance they’d come through. There were cargo areas full of rovers, a shuttle launch section, recreation areas and the life support systems buried deeper in Larissa’s surface.
The door to the command section was locked but only took Fugia a few minutes to open using its control panel. The two halves slid open on a long room with rounded corners everywhere. Screens lined the upper walls, all black now, leaning over workstations covered in dust. The construction indicated it had never been designed for zero-g.
Harl paused at the doorway and looked inside, then stepped into the open central space. Without warning, several turrets in upper corners slid out of recesses and coordinated projectile fire on where he stood. Harl threw himself backwards, away from the doorway.
Andy said.
Fugia answered.
Andy cursed and went after him with his pistol raised, searching for the turret he knew had to be there somewhere. He found the black muzzle and sent pulse fire down its gullet, moving from side to side to keep it from locking on him.
Fugia was already sitting at a nearby console. She’d pulled her helmet and gloves off and was flicking through menus on the console screen.
Andy glanced back at Harl, not trusting her report. The big man shrugged, however, and reached up to take off his helmet.
As Andy looked around, he realized she was correct. There was no indication of moisture or corrosion anywhere. Aside from the dust, the place looked like it had just rolled off the manufacturing line. While the other parts of the facility had looked lived in, he wondered if the workers had ever stepped foot in this central chamber.
He reached up and unfastened his helmet. The air tasted dry and metallic, as he expected. He walked over beside Fugia and watched her searching through databases. She quickly scanned text documents with a distant expression that indicated she was using her Link simultaneously.
“This is insane,” she said. “They’ve been trapping and studying AIs for years. All the junk on Proteus was just the last five years.” Fugia leaned closer to the screen, focus returning to her eyes. She blinked rapidly, and Andy realized she was crying. She wiped her nose on her suit’s bulky sleeve.
“Where are all the AIs, then?” Andy asked.
“Physically? I don’t know. They were dismantled here. What the researchers learned was transferred to this central database and then sent outside. There are sales records to locations all over Sol. Heartbridge is there of course. Lyssa might owe some of herself to this place.”
“And Alexander? Can you access him?”
“I haven’t tried yet.”
“I think we should,” Andy said.
Fugia shook her head. “I don’t know. That could be incredibly dangerous.”
“Well, he’s awake and looks pissed off to me. We need to try to do something.”
The image of Proteus filled Andy’s mind. He saw the moon like a hot coal against Neptune’s aquamarine. The space around it warped with heat and energy, the center growing whiter, nearly translucent, as the weapons barrage continued to set the moon more deeply ablaze.
“Xander is killing him,” Fugia said, staring blankly at the display. She blinked again, snapping out of her reverie, and quickly re-engaged with the console.
“What are you doing?” Andy asked
“Looking for backups.”
All around them, other consoles came alive. The screens hanging from the edge of the ceiling flashed awake and began paging through menus independently.
“Fugia,” Andy said. “Are you doing this?”
She had taken her hands away from the console, which was now flickering without her control. She shook her head, staring in wonder at the activity.
“It’s not me,” Fugia said. “It’s him.”
“What’s he doing?” Harl asked, stepping into the center of the room beside Andy to gaze up at the screens full of shifting data.
“Fighting for survival, I would imagine.”
STELLAR DATE: 11.21.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: HMS Resolute Charity’s networks
REGION: Neptune, OuterSol
Proteus exploded. The heart of the moon burst outward, burning everything around it in an expanding orb of destruction. The outer wave caught the Resolute Charity and spread past it.
Why would Xander destroy himself like this?
Lyssa experienced the ship’s destruction from inside with Xander and through Sunny Skies’ sensor array. Fran had flipped the ship in an emergency burn with everything the little freighter had.
They were standing in the empty command deck of the ship. Kindel and Jeremiah stood next to the great holodisplay, Neptune’s glow in their faces, watching the visual of Proteus as it disintegrated and spread outward.
Xander said.
The holodisplay zoomed in on the moon. Andy was there. She was there. Lyssa watched from three views now, ready for this one to cut out at any second. The Resolute Charity was melting around them.
Larissa was a roundish grey orb one second, then it was a sea urchin covered in spines. Missiles were launching from the moon. Wave after wave shot outward, course corrected, and then arced out over Neptune.
She frowned, not understanding at first. Were they attacking the clouds of Neptune? Why? Then she analyzed the flight paths and saw each of them was following a slingshot flight path. They were launching away from Neptune.
