Tarkos frowned. “That station might still be manned, by Neelee who won’t believe we’re on their side. The controls will be complex. We’ll have to figure out how to get it sufficiently operational, and how to target it, while not getting killed. And we’ll have to run the weapon a long while, if we aim to burn all the rings, all the way around the planet.”
“Need ship,” Bria said. “Need systems experts.”
“And we need to do all that fast,” Tarkos said. He opened his mouth to say something sarcastic, something like, and how are we going to do that? The population of Neelee-ornor just got bombed. They’re still getting bombed, by the small weapons still falling down into the atmosphere.
But then Tarkos slapped a hand to his head, the heavy glove of his armor striking him soundly. He looked to Tiklik, who still floated in the cockpit’s doorway.
“I know where we can get a ship,” Tarkos said. “And I know where we can get a lot of… unique crew. Crew that know how to fix and run machines. System’s experts, as you said.”
Bria showed her teeth. “Do.”
“Tiklik,” Tarkos said. “You’re a navigator. Can you steer the cruiser, with its AI down? We need to get into closer orbit. We need to go back to where we started.”
CHAPTER 7
Tiklik managed to steer the cruiser to a trajectory within a few kilomeasures of the original position of Savannah Runner. The AI had wedged itself into the cockpit doorway, arms extended, head down as if in a trance. It flew the ship using only visual queues from the exterior telescopes. The engines burned at an e-gee, and then deaccelerated hard into the target volume of space. Tarkos and Bria remained strapped in, fidgeting with the controls that still worked, and trying to manage what repairs seemed possible using the cruiser’s onboard robots.
When the cruiser drifted into orbit they found the space above Neelee-ornor choked with decaying particles and falling debris that generated a roar of radio noise and dangerous radiation. Most comm traffic was incomprehensible, broken and weak. Hyper-radio was nearly as bad, as virtual particle bleed overwhelmed the transmissions. Tarkos initiated a transmission to Zoroastrian using tightbeam laser communication. “You better take this one on your own,” Tarkos said to Bria. “Send voice only. Don’t mention me.”
Bria showed her teeth and said, “Harmonizer cruiser requests docking and assist. Systems disabled in combat operations.”
“This is Zoroastrian,” the reply came back, voice only. “Please repeat request.”
“Harmonizer cruiser requests docking and assist. Systems disabled in combat operations.”
A very long pause followed. Tarkos pictured the bridge crew calling the captain from her command office, explaining the situation, and then listening to her curse angrily.
“Harmonizer cruiser,” came the reply. Tarkos grimaced at the tentative tone of the speaker. “Harmonizer cruiser, this ship has been asked to leave Neelee space. We are preparing to depart.”
“Harmonizer cruiser requests docking and assist,” Bria repeated, with her mercilessly insistent tone. “Comply with Earth-Alliance treaty.”
The ship was ten kilomeasures away. Tarkos watched it on a ship telescope, the UN flag just visible on its side. After a very long while, the ship began to nudge forward, then accelerate. It turned an arc and headed for them.
“Full stop,” he told Tiklik.
Tarkos unbuckled his seat, floated out of it, and flipped over, about to pull himself toward the starboard airlock. But he paused. “Bria, pursuing this plan is going to be dangerous. And the second wave of Ulltrian ships is going to do a lot of damage. Don’t you want to tell me why you blew up that OnUnAn ship, before one of us is killed? Just to get it on the record? Or even just to tell your partner, your best and only human friend, before he dies?”
Bria closed her top eyes.
Tarkos sighed and pulled himself over Tiklik.
_____
Captain Shirazi waited on the other side of the airlock, with one of the guards Tarkos had seen before: the tall, dark-skinned woman. The guard held a laser rifle with the barrel pointing at the floor. Bria pulled herself out into Zoroastrian first, her helmet off.
“I’m Captain Shirazi.” The Captain spoke in slow, careful Galactic, a little bit too loud, as if she worried that a Sussurat might not hear as well as a human. “How may we assist you, Harmonizer?”
Tarkos followed Bria then, with Tiklik moving very slowly behind, black arms waving in the dull glow of the cruiser’s interior, its vents leaking alien blue light.
The captain’s face turned white when she saw Tarkos.
“No,” she said. “No. Get off my ship.”
“Ship commandeered for essential defense operations,” Bria growled.
“No,” the Captain repeated. Her face changed from white to red as her fury mounted. “Do you know what you have done?” she hissed at Tarkos. “The Neelee are threatening to harm the Earth-Alliance treaty negotiations. They threatened to reconsider Earth’s request to join the Alliance, because of you. You, a single human, screwing up everything for twelve billion people!”
Bria showed her teeth and shifted slightly so that she stood between the Captain and Tarkos. “Ship commandeered for essential defense operations.”
The Captain frowned, as if confused by this. While she considered, Bria interfaced with the ship’s AI, sending the request for Harmonizer emergency powers. The captain saw in her own data space, through her own implants, the ship systems being transferred over to Bria’s command, one after another. Her eyes went wide with surprise, and she began shouting cancellation commands aloud. She obviously had not known such a thing was possible, she had not suspected that the ship’s AI would defer to a Harmonizer. She had trusted the Kirt designed ship to be entirely under her sole command. But the cascade of systems reporting compliance to Bria’s request for control went on and on, a list falling through the data space of everyone who could look into ship systems.
The Captain turned to the tall, dark-skinned woman on her right. “Shoot them,” she ordered.
Bria did not move, but the armor over her left forearm parted and a small prism thrust up above the opening. The wall by the guard sparked as Bria shot a laser beam just in front of the guard. As the woman raise her laser rifle, the end of the barrel separated from the main gun and spun away. The gas expelling from the lasing chamber jetted the woman back. She tumbled down the hall. When she let go of the gun and climbed back to the captain’s side, the captain stopped her hand with a touch when the woman reached for her pistol. They both stared at the weapons sprouting from Bria’s armor: barrels and laser prisms peeking up through the ceramic metal on her arms, shoulders, thighs.
“We will forget that just happened,” Tarkos said. “I think that would be best. Your ship is under the command of Briaathursiasalientiormethesses. It will remain so until this emergency is over. Compliance is required by the Consortium Treaty that Earth signed with the Alliance. You may file any complaints with Special Advisor Preeajitala, assuming she survived the damage to Savannah Runner.”
“This is not a combat ship!” the captain shouted.
“Captain,” Tarkos said, his tone becoming pleading. “We’re hoping that you and your crew won’t need to fight. We must gather and transport a special crew from one location to another. That’s it. Then we hope your ship will be freed.”
Tarkos switched to English. “Please, I beg of you. You are embarrassing me and you are embarrassing the human race and you embarrassing Earth and you just very, very badly embarrassed yourself. This is a Sussurat warrior, a creature on a sacred task. She is respected with awe throughout the Galaxy. I have seen Hurlkor the size of mountains dim their lights to honor her. I have watched Neelee and Bright Councilors step aside to let her pass, their heads bowed in respect. I have seen Kirt engineering masters, their shells gray with age, cross their claws before her to show her honor. And you just tried to kill her.”
Shirazi swallowed, a hint of doubt creeping into
her face.
“I understand that you were surprised that she had the power to take over this ship,” Tarkos continued. “But that’s a legally granted power, by the Consortium treaty that Earth signed. So, again, we’re going to assume that was a mistake. We’ll call it a weapon misfiring.”
“You will never walk free on Earth,” the Captain hissed. “I’ll see you put in prison for life.”
“Captain, if we are so fortunate that both I and our shared homeworld survive the coming war, I’ll be happy to die there in any prison you can devise.”
Bria showed her teeth in impatience. “Come. Set course.”
Tarkos transmitted coordinates to Zoroastrian’s AI. They all drifted down to the floor as the ship began to accelerate.
“No,” the captain said, but her voice had a tone of defeat in it as she spoke. “You said you were… fugitives. You don’t have authority. You’ve already hurt our name by just associating with us.”
“We’re still Harmonizers. No formal charges have been made.”
“I’m going to ask the Neelee to stop this.”
“Good luck with that,” Tarkos said. “Because they’ve got a lot more important things than you to worry about. Millions of Neelee are dying, on the planet below. Millions more will die. You need to get some perspective, Captain.”
Bria pushed past Shirazi, walking on all four legs toward the bridge, the heavy gloves on her armor going clack, clack, clack on the floor. The captain’s guard had to squeeze herself to the wall, in order to let the huge Sussurat pass. Bria let her shoulder brush against the woman, just to help the human to understand what a few hundred kilograms of predatory mass in armor felt like, as it slammed you aside.
_____
With the ship in motion, Tarkos returned with Tiklik to the cruiser. The robot again fell into silence, but its quick movements assured Tarkos that it remained in normal time. They stopped, side by side, in the back of the single hall of the cruiser, where instruments and gear for local space observation were stored. The ship ventilation began to whirr, compensating for some shift or other in the interior pressure caused by their docking.
Tarkos gave Tiklik control of the cruiser’s telescopes. “Look at the nearest of the sites that Pala’s data targets,” he told the AI. It waved an arm, but said nothing. Tarkos opened two projections from primary telescopes.
As Tiklik adjusted focus, soft white shapes sharpened into craggy gray ice boulders, single rocks out of the millions that formed the pale rings of Neelee-ornor. Each telescope swung over fields of frozen water and gas, till it settled on boulders of stone and ice the size of small asteroids. The white rocks appeared indistinguishable from the other rocks in the rings—until Tiklik increased the magnification. Then Tarkos could see it clearly: the surface of each of the boulders seethed, as if the gasses on its surface boiled and bubbled over. Tarkos leaned forward, squinting at one of the images. Tiklik increased the magnification.
The surface of the rock shifted, changing shape as he watched. Small towers, like smoke stacks, spotted the surface. As Tarkos watched, one, then two, then a dozen projectiles emitted from these towers. Tarkos recognized this; he had seen structures like these on his first mission as a Harmonizer. Nanomachine and animal symbionts were eating the rock and ice, using the matter to copy themselves, and also to build launchers that would spread their seed throughout the planet’s rings, leaping randomly from stone to stone.
“Bria,” Tarkos transmitted, on a priority channel.
“Speak,” the Sussurat answered immediately.
“Tiklik and I are looking at the rings. We have confirmed that symbiont micromachines are in the rings, and they’re spreading quickly. Pala was right. The bad news is that they’re spreading more quickly than I thought possible. They’re going to fill the ring. We need to inform Savannah Runner.”
“Much noise,” Bria said. “Will transmit also to planetary government. Failure of reception possible.”
“Eventually someone will listen,” Tarkos said.
Tarkos touched Tiklik. “Can you program these telescopes to watch each location in turn, say for a minute, and to transmit all the data to Zoroastrian for retransmission down to the planet and to Savannah Runner?”
Tiklik said nothing, but a series of messages fell through Tarkos’s data space, formulating the communications protocols.
“When you’re done, do whatever it is you need to do before facing vacuum,” Tarkos told the AI. “We’re going outside.”
_____
Tarkos floated out of the Zoroastrian’s airlock with Tiklik’al’Takas strapped again to his chest. The sight outside stunned him. Seen not through dozens of small screens and data transmissions, but rather seen with his own eyes, through the broad visor on his helmet, he could understand the vast arc and scope of the remains of the battle. Bright lights blinked in the sky: explosions in the orbit of Neelee-ornor, as debris smashed into satellites. Silver streaks blazed below them, as fragments of ships burned up, skipping across the atmosphere of the planet. Some of those streaking meteorites, they had learned, were stealthed weapons, falling down with debris. Two fission weapons had exploded above major cities. The fallout left black streaks under the clouds. Tarkos’s suit protested constantly from the gamma rays and heavy particles splashing over him, the dirty remains of anti-matter explosions and nuclear attacks.
He looked toward the planet, scanning space. Finally he saw it: visible only in silhouette against the rings of Neelee-ornor floated the black dungeon.
Tarkos gave his rocket pack a hard burst, impatient to be inside the station. They flipped half way to the station and deaccelerated, his face plate now looking back. Zoroastrian, with their wounded cruiser clinging to its side, retreated into a gleaming speck as he fell.
His feet hit the station hard. Tiklik sprawled its four legs and when Tarkos toppled forward they landed on Tiklik’s feet. The robot let its legs spring slightly, reducing the impact.
“Thanks,” Tarkos grunted. He released the line holding the robot and stood, his boots using their gecko grips to find microscopic flaws in the station surface that they could cling into. The dock Tarkos had entered before lay only a few dozen steps ahead. He started the slow walk. Tiklik followed.
Inside the dimly illuminated bay, Tarkos went to the first door he had opened before. The long hall appeared now even longer than he had remembered, ringed with doors that stretched off and threatened many hours, if not days, of work if he were to free all of the robots here. He went to the cell where the robot that resembled a Neelee had been. He cranked the first rotating lock.
“Help me, Tiklik,” he said. The robot clung to the door, and using two arms began to open the second ring lock.
In a minute they had freed the AI. It floated out of the doorway, moving in the sudden, but seemingly timid way that Neelee did.
“I am Harmonizer Amir Tarkos,” he transmitted. He sent his Harmonizer authority codes. He did not know if these codes would be recognized by a being imprisoned for centuries or eons. Had there even been a Harmonizer Corp when this being was locked in this cell? Tarkos did not know.
The robot looked at him, silent, its huge eyes still and cold.
“Listen, uh….” He hesitated, then said, “I’m going to call you Neelee-bot. ‘Bot’ means manufactured autonomous body, in my planet’s most common language. Is that acceptable?”
“No,” the robot said.
“No?” Tarkos asked, surprised by the transmitted answer. He’d meant it as a rhetorical question.
“‘Neelee’ means self-made. I was not self-made.”
“Listen, Neelee-bot. None of us is self-made. All of us are self-made. You were constructed by Neelee. I was constructed by evolution. So neither of us made ourselves. But then we have to decide what kind of person to be, and we do that by doing things. And you have to decide what to do, just as I have to decide what to do. So, in that sense, we’re both self-made, got it?”
The robot said nothing.
>
Tarkos took a deep breath. “Neelee-bot, I need your help. So does Neelee-ornor, and all of the Alliance. Will you obey me?”
“Yes,” the robot answered, its transmitted Galactic coming in Neelee barks and soft grunts.
“Listen closely to the following commands. Command one: Open each cell door in this station that is closed, as quickly as possible, until all doors are opened. Command two: tell command one and command two to each artificial intelligence that comes out of a cell. Do you understand?”
As answer, the robot crawled over to the next door, and began to turn one of the locks. Tiklik helped it, grabbing another of the wheels.
Tarkos moved over to the next hall, to do the same thing again.
_____
Some of the AIs refused to leave their cells. They had run down, died, or had gone mad years before. But most followed the commands, and quickly joined the exponentially growing force of robots freeing their kin. When they were done, they gathered in the bay, floating so densely that their limbs sometimes intertwined, and they appeared like some vast school of diverse and monstrous shrimp. Tiklik counted them.
“Three thousand six hundred and twelve,” Tiklik answered.
Tarkos looked out at them all. He floated by the entrance to the bay, which remained open. Reflected light from Neelee-ornor glinted over his armor. He cleared his throat, hesitating. These machines were ancient, crafted by beings of vast and subtle intellect, beings that had earned eons of peace. When these artificial intelligences were forged, back on Earth humanity numbered only a few million, and lived in ignorance and fear, without science, without understanding, and in constant warfare. What could he say to these creations of an ancient golden age? To these brilliant products of brilliant minds?
Ice Sky Storm Page 8
