by B. V. Larson
“Wow, sir, that’s smart. Even Marvin didn’t figure that out. Our Marvin, I mean.”
“Or he didn’t tell us. No, he would have said something if he knew.” I activated suit movement again and slapped Kwon on the back. “Now we know how they’re doing it and why it’s taking them so long. They have to stop and rest a lot, sucking up the ambient power from the maze until they can go on. As long as they keep power in the batteries, the suits don’t need to burn fuel.”
“Okay. So let’s recharge.”
We stayed that way for a few more minutes, watching our power meters increasing as my mind raced fitting together pieces of this puzzle we were lost within.
We moved on when we were full, walking steadily toward our receding goal for several minutes.
“Um, about the beetles,” Kwon mused. “If their food is power, maybe they’ll want to eat our batteries.”
I laughed. “If so, maybe that was why they were trying to eat Marvin. They really did want to digest him—or at least his energy.” That made me think of something else, but I had to mull it over for a while before I ran it past Kwon.
The big man put out an arm. “My batteries are almost drained again. We gotta stop and recharge or we’ll burn fuel.”
I stopped in the middle of the corridor with him and then turned around to our back-to-back mode. “What a pain. Five minutes of walking and ten minutes of gathering power from the air.”
“Better than running out.”
“Yes and the fuel is our fighting reserve. I doubt we’ll find any bottles of refined hydrogen isotopes just lying around.”
Ten minutes later we set off again. In this way, we progressed. It was maddening, but after two hours we hadn’t used any fuel. “This must be how Valiant’s people are doing it,” I said. “No wonder they haven’t gotten too far ahead of us. Sokolov must be stopping them every few minutes to recharge.”
“But now we can’t catch up.”
Kwon was right. Instead of overtaking them, we were probably just keeping up. “They gotta sleep sometime,” he said.
“True, and we don’t. Not for a while. We’re in tip-top physical shape, but not all the crew is. We two can eat nutrient paste, take stims and stick to this travel routine. At some point they’ll have to stop and rest or leave the slower people behind.”
Our chase turned into a game of walking for five minutes and freezing for ten. We automated our timing so that the suits themselves optimized the energy management, but it was still drudgery. After hours of trudging down empty, debris-littered corridors lit only by our suit lamps, I truly knew what rats in a maze felt like. Only I wasn’t at all sure there was any cheese at the end. We slurped nutrient pastes, drank water from tubes and let the nano-recyclers reclaim our wastes—not something I wanted to dwell on. Now I understood why Sokolov smelled so bad when we’d found him.
Every hour or so, we descended a level using giant stair-steps that made me feel like a living teddy bear trying to reach his favorite child’s room. Now and again we found evidence of Valiant’s people—a fitting broken off, a droplet of smart metal, a snack wrapper from some enterprising crewman who’d managed to figure out how to get it out of the package and into his helmet without suffocating.
Never underestimate the average human’s ingenuity when he wants nacho-flavored chips.
“If I didn’t hate Sokolov before, I do now,” I mumbled as I slogged ahead. “I’m starting to see your point of view, Kwon, and I’m hoping we run into something to fight out of sheer boredom.”
“I’m all right, boss.”
I stopped him before he started descending the giant steps. “Wait. Check your HUD. Something’s behind us.” I turned around to face back the way we came. I could see an EM source coming down the passage we had just traveled. However, in the darkness I couldn’t tell what it was.
“Suit, lights off. Go to active sensors, front only.” Maybe those we were following wouldn’t detect our pulses if we sent them backward.
“Oh, shit, boss,” Kwon said as the target of our sensors resolved itself on our HUDs. “That’s a Macro!”
-21-
Kwon was right. A Macro—a medium-sized model about fifty feet tall—shuffled toward us like an enormous six-legged spider, not hurrying at all. Unfortunately, its strides were long so it still approached us at about twenty miles per hour. A beam projector and a couple of gun tubes dangled slackly in turrets from its thorax, jouncing with every step as if the critter wasn’t even bothering to secure them. I couldn’t see a weapon on top where Macros often had an anti-air turret.
“Move slow,” Kwon whispered. “I don’t think it’s seen us. Back up and take cover behind this first step. We can ambush it.”
“Good idea—except for the ambush part.” We walked backward until we felt the edge of the step, and then we eased downward until we stood on the next platform with our rifles resting on the corridor floor like infantrymen in a trench.
“Stupid thing is blind,” Kwon said. “Our radar is pinging the hell out of it.”
“It looks pretty beat up,” I replied. The closer it got, the better became the resolution on the synthetic radar picture.
“How we going to kill it, boss?”
“If it wanders by, we don’t need to.”
“You’ve got to kidding me! My first Macro in twenty years, and I have to let it go?”
“Hold on, Kwon. Suit, illuminate with UV, IR and sonar and give us a composite view.”
Immediately I could see the thing in telescopic detail. It moved laboriously and one leg dragged. Dings and scars covered it and I could see only one optical cluster under active control. “It’s in bad shape.”
“Good. Let’s let it get close and take out its eyes first. Then we both hit the beamer, then the gun. Last we start working on the knees and bring it down. That’s how we did it old-school.”
“Old-school it is,” I agreed reluctantly. Even a damaged Macro was dangerous for two men to take on. “Call it.”
We waited tensely believing that at any moment the monster would see us or at least our various emissions giving us vision in the darkness, but it seemed not to care. Kwon got ready to fire.
“Wait!” I hissed as it loomed closer and closer. “Remember Sun Tsu! We can win without fighting. Stand down and duck. Squeeze into a corner so you don’t get stepped on!”
“Come on, Boss—”
“Do it! That’s an order, Kwon.”
Grumbling under his breath, Kwon pulled back his rifle and dropped down to back up into the corner of the giant stair. I did the same on the opposite side. Both of us stood in patches of debris, which made me confident that neither beetles nor Macros typically stepped exactly on this spot.
I held my breath as giant steel legs came down to slam onto our step, and then the next and the next. We both kept our rifles aimed at the sensor cluster, but the Macro ignored us completely as it lumbered on past.
“Perfect,” I whispered. “We’ll follow it from a distance. Hopefully it will run into our people and make a good enough diversion that we’ll be able to get close.”
“What if it kills someone?” Kwon asked.
“Did you see it? It should have fired at us long ago. It was blind. Or maybe it’s been reprogrammed not to attack. Or maybe it doesn’t know we’re biotics because of our suits. It’s a risk we’ll have to take.”
We trailed the thing. It paused every few minutes just like we’d been doing, leading me to believe it was using the same ambient power recharge method we were. As we waited between sections of our stuttering journey, I thought about what Sokolov had said about the Macros and his Nano fleet.
Alamo and the rest of the Nano ships had followed the Macros through the ring into this system. Before the battle could be joined, the Ancients had apparently stopped the fight and Sokolov found himself inside the maze which I assumed existed inside the golden world. Or it was accessible through the machinery coating the world made up of Slabs and Squares. Now we’d r
un across evidence of Macros surviving after all these years.
As we trailed the monster excitedly, I realized something else. I’d always thought of Macros as interchangeable even though there were different types. Macro ground combat machines were not Macro beings in charge of the others. They didn’t fly from place to place using ships in the same sense that biotics did. Rather, they and their ships and factories formed a collective whole, linked in a networked machine mind at every locale. If the Ancients, or rather their golden devices, had removed Sokolov and the Pandas from their Nano ships and dropped them in the maze, they’d probably done the same to this Macro. It was therefore probably a straggler, and hopefully it was alone. For a Macro, being alone would make it stupid.
More and more, the Ancient devices seemed just as inflexible as any other machines. I wondered again if the Ancients were really an artificial intelligence. If they were, maybe there was an inherent limitation that could only be overcome in some very specific manner. Marvin was the only truly lifelike robot with the ability to exceed his own programming that I’d ever encountered.
Were the Ancients machines themselves, or had they built intelligent machines? If their ships were automated, I’d seen nothing to indicate their ships were smarter than Marvin. Could they make genuine machine life, or did they simply choose not to?
Knowing Marvin, I could believe they’d tried it out and decided it was a bad idea.
I wondered, too, about the lack of a second ring in this system. Virtually every system we’d encountered had a ring leading in and one or more leading out.
An image of the Lithos’ hollow planets came to mind. The ancient version of Marvin I’d met had pointed out the golden planet might also be hollow. It seemed to follow that the exit ring to this system was within the golden world somewhere or, less probably, that the planet itself could be used as a ring if one knew how to manipulate it.
As required reading back at the Star Force Academy, I’d learned all about the wars my dad had fought. The Nano ships had vanished early on abandoning pilots like my dad or abducting them. Sokolov had been carried off by my dad’s ship Alamo herself.
Except for Sokolov’s windy stories, we knew little about what had happened to the Nano ships after they left Earth. Some years later they’d reappeared to defend the Blues in the Eden System, and most of them had been destroyed.
We’d never known if some other biotic species out there might have built more of them using their factories just as we had to produce Nano fleets in the early days of Star Force.
As to the fate of the Macros, even less was known. My father had destroyed every one of them he could find, but we’d known all along some might be lurking out beyond the rings where we’d never managed to explore.
I was definitely in that territory now. That place on all the maps from the Middle Ages that became vague, scrawled with cryptic warnings. Beyond here, there be dragons…
My single option was to assume Valiant was the only ship I could use to escape this place. If ships existed—Nano, Macro or otherwise—they were as likely to attack as help us.
So much mystery gripped the work of the Ancients. I got the feeling I’d never understand it all, but at least I believed I was getting my head around a piece of it. Maybe the golden world was a defense mechanism, or perhaps it was the interstellar equivalent of a bug collector, shipping specimens to where the real Ancients, the actual builders of the rings, resided. That in turn made me wonder why they wanted the ships and not their crews…
“Boss, we’re getting close,” Kwon said. I checked my HUD and saw he was right. The Star Force radio emissions were near and strong, the result of people talking to one another.
“Suit, can you decrypt the friendly signals?”
“If I synchronize my radio encryption with theirs,” said my suit. “However, you have specified passive sensors only.”
“Right.” The suits changed their scrambling from time to time and so had to “handshake” each other to update the encryption keys—but that would tell them we were here. “Suit, can you synchronize without the other suits or brains knowledge?”
“No.”
“Damn.” Then I thought of something. “Suit, can you change how we appear in the HUD network? In other words, can you make our icons and ID read as someone else?”
“Yes.”
“Can you alter our voices to match the records of known crew? A voice clone like a video clone, except audio only?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Kwon, give your suit the same instructions I do. Suit, as soon as firing breaks out, immediately synchronize your comms into the network. Try to suppress any alarms or notifications about us joining. We want to join their chat channels, but avoid appearing on their HUDs and mapping systems. We’ll move in close enough to listen in.”
“They’ll notice us somehow, sir,” Kwon said.
“They won’t be able to tell there are two extra blips without counting. Our people will be tired and distracted, and there are almost fifty of them. We’re not going to walk into the middle of them. We’ll just join their network and stay quiet. Maybe we’ll be able to blend in.”
“Worth a try. But what happens if they do notice?”
“Then we go public as ourselves and hope Hansen and the others back us and not Sokolov.”
“In case you didn’t know—Hansen doesn’t like you much, boss.”
I rolled my eyes. Hansen and I had had many run-ins, but I felt our working relationship was functional now.
“I was ready to clobber him a couple times,” Kwon said, “back when he talked about you in the mess hall.”
“Thanks for the thought, Kwon, but I think I’ll—”
Just then, light blazed from the corridor in front of us.
“It’s on,” Kwon said, lifting his rifle and preparing to charge forward.
I kicked out my foot immediately, tripping him. He went sprawling in the trash and turned back to look at me with a scowl.
“We’re going to take up a quiet position and watch, remember, Sergeant Major?”
“Yes, sir.”
We almost got there too late. The Macro crashed to the golden metal deck as we reached a good vantage point to watch the show. Smoke and dust hung in the thin atmosphere providing us with a little extra cover. We edged away from the region occupied by Sokolov and Kalu, choosing to take up a position in the trash heaps as far from them as possible while still being in the local chat loop.
“Boss,” Kwon said on a private channel, “shouldn’t we get a few people on our side? One by one, maybe?”
“Who can you trust?”
“Gunny Taksin is solid. I can message him privately. A couple of the Fleet noncoms should be all right, too.”
“Okay. Go slow. Talk to Taksin first. I don’t want anyone noticing anything suspicious.”
The party from Valiant went into rest-and-recharge mode after expending battery power to bring down the pathetic Macro, so I was able to survey the situation without distraction. Sokolov and Kalu had on marine battlesuits. They must have taken two of the spares. I doubted they could fight well in them, but if it came down to violence that made my job a lot tougher.
All of the non-marine crew had on standard full rigs suitable for working in or outside a ship in space, but they weren’t armored. They did have weapons, though, self-defense sidearms that every Fleet member carried during combat. I couldn’t just shoot Sokolov and be done with it. Without at least the marine contingent on our side, I could see a confused battle breaking out, friendly against friendly as people tried to sort out what the hell was going on.
The marines had spread out pulling security, but the other crewmembers had grouped themselves by section—engineer’s mates, drone controllers, gun techs and so on. As long as they didn’t take a good hard look at their HUDs in tactical mode, we should be all right.
I tried to figure out who I could approach like Kwon with Taksin, but I realized all the people I knew personally wer
e back on Valiant. Adrienne, Sakura, Bradley, Chief Cornelius who liked to spike coffee, Moranian, Hoon and Marvin. I could call all the marines by name, but that was Kwon’s backyard.
So I worked on pinpointing the bomb instead. It was just a warhead pulled off one of our big ship-killer missiles. It was shaped like a rocket nose cone. Heck, it was the nose cone, just detached from the fuselage with four smart-metal carrying handles slapped on. I didn’t see any manual detonator on it, so it must be on a coded radio trigger. No doubt Sokolov had the code and no one else. That complicated my life even more.
Four marines had custody of the bomb. I made a mental note that one was Corporal Fuller, the man whose life I’d saved just a few days ago.
Sokolov and Kalu stood immobilized in their battlesuits faceplate to faceplate recharging as if having a private chat. Right now I wished I could hack their armor, freezing them permanently and cutting them off from moving or giving orders. However, marine suit networks were built to make this impossible just in case some enemy tried it. Making a suit read input data incorrectly was one thing, but taking over its functions was probably only possible for someone extraordinary like Marvin.
Marvin. Hmm. I activated my quantum ansible. “Marvin, can you hear me?”
“I hear you, Captain Riggs,” Marvin’s voice responded immediately, sounding as if he was at my elbow.
I traded dates with him to give myself some assurance I was talking to my own version of Marvin. “How’re you doing on freeing the ship?” I asked.
“We have succeeded in theory. However, Chief Sakura has not yet begun to execute our plans for fear of attracting the Ancients’ attention and being immobilized once more.”
“So you’re still falling?”
“For the time being.”
I thought a moment. “Marvin, can you go help the Raptors on Stalker get free as well?”
