by Ian Douglas
“I need your help, love. I need you to do something for me.”
“What?” she asked as she led him into her house. A floor-to-ceiling wall screen wrapped around the curve of her living area, tuned to a news feed. A talking head three meters tall was talking about the developing battle in the outskirts of the Ki system. She frowned as she accessed the feed through her implant, and the screen muted.
“I need access to Newton. And I can’t do it myself.”
“But you already have Level One access, don’t you?”
Adler hesitated. Level One was unrestricted, but he’d lost that when he’d been declared mentally incompetent. Obviously, you couldn’t have crazy people tapping into the AI that ran the whole colony. He was unwilling to tell his old lover that he’d been unceremoniously kicked off the Cybercouncil, that as of right now he was an ordinary civilian . . . a nobody.
“I . . . need to be careful right now. The situation with the Cybercouncil is rather delicate right at the moment.”
She made a disgusted face. “Politics . . .” She made it sound like a particularly foul obscenity.
“I know how you feel about it,” he said. “Believe me, right now I feel the same way.”
“Is it something illegal?”
“Helga! How can you ask that?”
She shrugged. “You’re a politician, Günter.” She might have been lecturing a particularly obtuse child.
He sighed. “It’s not illegal.” He fished into the depths of a carry pouch riding on his jumpsuit’s hip and produced a molecular drive, a black sliver a centimeter long. “I just need Newton to see this. He can answer me on the same drive.”
He didn’t add that the drive included a number of vid segments he’d created himself using commercially available software. When the drive was inserted into Helga’s home net, those segments, together with a low-grade AI to run them, would go out over every channel in the colony.
“I still don’t understand why you can’t ask him yourself,” Helga said.
“There are . . . reasons.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I really don’t want to go into it, okay?”
She shrugged and accepted the drive.
He relaxed a bit, then. He’d spent hours working out the vids, using an off-line computer in his office without any link to the Net, and he was going to keep it that way until he was certain that those . . . nightmares weren’t returning.
He glanced at the wall screen, where the vidfeed had shifted from the news anchor’s enormous face to a shot of the Bluestar at considerable range. Was that a transmission from the Ad Astra, he wondered?
“What’s happening there?” he asked.
“It sounds like the Dark Raiders again,” Braun told him. “There may be another battle.”
“What do you think, love?” he asked her. “Should we side with the Cooperative against the Andromedan bad guys?”
She sagged. “Gods, I don’t know. If we do, what difference can we make? Compared to these civilizations—every one we’ve encountered here so far, anyway, we’re deaf, blind, and toothless. Ants fighting elephants! Getting into a local war sounds like a great way to get stepped on.”
“Said the ant,” Adler said, nodding. “Yeah. I hear you.”
Helga inserted the drive in a receptacle on her desk. The first vid came up on a wall-sized screen in the living room. An obviously terrified young woman carried a baby down a dark and shadowy alleyway.
“What’s this?” Helga asked.
“An unofficial public service announcement,” he told her, dismissing it as unimportant. “So . . . do other people you know feel that way?”
“Lots of them do. Kazuko Tanayama, down the hill there, is terrified. She thinks we should find a quiet, remote star with planets somewhere, dig a deep hole, and pull it in after us.”
The woman on-screen screamed.
“Isolationist, in other words,” he said. “Interesting.”
“Why do you say that? The Cybercouncil came out in solid support of a Cooperative alliance. I assume you had something to do with that?”
He decided not to tell her that he had felt that way once . . . but that he was beginning to think that an isolationist stance might be just the ticket to bring himself back to power.
After all, politics was the delicate art of telling people what they wanted to hear, winning their support . . .
. . . and doing precisely what you wanted afterward.
Chapter Eleven
Lord Commander St. Clair watched the slow but relentless approach of the alien tesseract through his in-head feed in silence. Ad Astra continued to loose volley after volley of thermonuclear destruction at the object, but so far as he could see the missiles were doing little to hurt that planet-sized monster.
“Where are the gunships?” he asked. “Damn it, where are the gunships?”
“We’re getting severe interference from in close,” Symms told him. “Battlespace comm net has degraded to 15 percent.”
“Transmit to the Cooperative,” St. Clair said. “Tell ’em . . . tell ’em to get their spidery asses in here with some support, because we can’t do this by ourselves.”
“Aye, aye, my lord.”
He wished he knew more about the agreement Ambassador Lloyd had struck with the local Cooperative representatives. There hadn’t been time since to discuss it, and his visit to the Ki Ring had been less than informative. Which meant they were entrusting the future of Tellus Ad Astra’s population to some kind of backroom-deal-on-a-handshake by the damned politicians.
To say he didn’t like it was a gross understatement.
He opened a channel with Newton. “How about it, Newton?” he asked. “Where do we stand with the locals after Lloyd’s meeting with them? Did we sign some sort of treaty with them?”
“Not as such, no. Agreements within the Cooperative are described, verified, and held inviolate as peer-to-peer statements between participating super AIs. Electronic validation ensures compliance.”
“And you have such an agreement with them?”
“As negotiated by Ambassador Lloyd, yes. We promise to provide military assistance, including insight into the nature of warfare which the Cooperative lacks.”
“I know that. What do they promise in return?”
“To provide us with unspecified assistance, including a star system in which to live, and both full status and participatory rights as members of the Cooperative.”
“Unspecified” had a rather inauspicious ring to it. St. Clair considered it, and the rest of what Newton had told him. “You know . . . I’m kind of uncomfortable with Lloyd making those kinds of decisions for our entire population.”
“Ambassador Lloyd has the full support of the Cybercouncil.”
“Which is also a problem, in my book.” St. Clair sighed. “Okay. We’ll have to ride with it for now. But so far as I’m concerned, the Cooperative has yet to win my trust. Especially as right now we’re the only part of this alliance in the fight—it would help a hell of a lot if they gave us some assistance out here.”
“I am in negotiation with the Mind of Ki now,” Newton told him. “Help is forthcoming.”
“I hope to hell it’s enough.”
“Halt! Identity check!”
Technician Roberto Chavez came to an abrupt halt as he hand-over-handed along the guideline deep within Ad Astra’s bowels. The heavily armored Marine floating in front of him seemed to have popped up out of nowhere.
“Madre de Dios!” he said, banging into the bulkhead to his right. “Scare the shit out of me, why don’t you?”
He felt the trickle of data through his implants as the Marine queried his ID and stats. Her ID data flowed back the other way: Lance Corporal Adria Fisher, First Platoon, Bravo Company, 3/1.
“Sorry, Mr. Chavez,” the Marine said. “We need to keep unauthorized personnel out.”
“I am authorized, chica,” he told her. He gestured at a massive bundle of fiber-optic cables running along the overhead. �
�They’ve got an enomaly in there and I was sent down here to check it out!”
She paused as if checking something. Then, “I see that, Mr. Chavez. Go ahead.”
Stupid military regulations. Grumbling half to himself, mostly to passive-aggressively let the Marine know that he was not happy at being frightened out of his skin by floating fortresses of personal combat armor, Chavez grabbed a bulkhead handhold and pulled his way past the sentry post and toward a major junction access in Ad Astra’s computer-network circuitry.
Enomaly—an electronic anomaly, a mild enough word to describe something that had the bridge staff wringing their hands. It was probably nothing, of course, but . . .
Over the past few minutes, the ship’s AI department had received a number of electronic warnings that there’d been a physical breach of wiring node K-177–15–90, one of the first-tier backbone routers along Ad Astra’s keel, and Chavez had been dispatched to check it out. Usually you didn’t have Marines getting in the way with Ad Astra’s labyrinthine lower decks, but during General Quarters Marine guards were posted at some hundreds of key stations throughout the ship, from the bridge to the engineering deck to important passageway junctions to vital AI-network nodes like this one.
He understood that. He just didn’t have to like it.
Chavez palmed open the locked hatch leading to the junction, using his personal implant code to identify himself and gain access. Inside, the bundled fiber-optics vanished into the gleaming silver boxes of ship-network routers.
There was no sign of physical damage or unauthorized entry. The electronic watchdogs in the compartment would have warned him instantly if that had been the case. Besides, that Marine outside was there to make certain no one tried to break in.
Still, he had to do a complete diagnostic. Those were the rules.
He popped open an access panel to the first router and reached inside. Chavez was a Class-2 cyborg, meaning that he had somewhat more in the way of electronic implants than most citizens—in particular a left hand and arm that were half metal, plastic, and complex circuitry. By touching a link plate inside the router with the palm of his hand, he could reroute the packets busily flowing through that small part of the total ship’s network and analyze them. He thought of the sampling process as tasting them; if anyone had accessed the system here, in particular if anyone had inserted a device to interfere with the Net in any way, he would know.
“Boss? Chavez. Checking in from K-177–15–90.”
“Whatcha got?” the voice of Subcommander Tomasz Jablonsky replied. He was the human director of Ad Astra’s AI department, though, in fact, the AI Newton itself was truly in charge. With a tiny portion of Newton’s thoughts flowing through his arm, however, Chavez was required to confirm things through a human department head. The thought of an AI being compromised by some outside agency was terrifying, and having humans in the loop helped keep that threat at bay.
“The node looks clear, sir. No sign of—”
And then the universe around him came apart.
A man’s piercing shriek echoed through the bare corridor, and Lance Corporal Fisher spun herself around and launched herself toward the open node access hatchway. Chavez was thrashing in the center of the compartment, adrift in zero-G, his body contorting in agony. The narrow compartment was filled with a spiraling swirl of dense, blue-tinted fog, and appeared to be opening somehow with a geometry that made no sense. “Chavez!” she snapped. “What—”
Gray-brown-black things, like writhing masses of flesh each growing in an instant from pinpoints to blobs the size of a man’s torso, materialized out of emptiness around Chavez’s body, closing around him. Chavez twisted horribly, then appeared to dwindle somehow, as though he was being dragged off into the distance . . . yet without moving from the tiny room. His left arm remained locked within the open access chamber of the router, however, as scarlet blood spilled into the air in blobs and droplets adrift in zero-G.
Fisher stared at the bleeding appendage in sick horror, then backed from the compartment, arms flailing. “Officer of the Deck!” she screamed over her cerebral link. “Post one-one-five! I have a situation down here!”
“Kaplan,” the voice of the OOD replied in her head. “What’s happening, Marine?”
What was happening? Fisher saw something abruptly materialize inside the router compartment . . . a cloud of blood emerging from nowhere, mingled with drifting bits of bone and flesh and—
Fisher was violently, retchingly sick inside her helmet.
“Fisher!” Kaplan called. “What is your tacsit?”
“A civilian tech—” She started retching again, her armored glove slamming against the contact plate that would close the door on that floating blood-cloud horror.
“Marine! Report!”
“A civilian just . . . just disappeared inside the router compartment!” she managed to say. “It . . . it looks like he was dee-verted!”
Dee-verted, dimensionally inverted. The term was new and highly informal slang for what had happened to Ad Astra’s CAS and a few others a week before . . . snatched by transdimensional entities out of her sealed workspace and literally turned inside out. Take a person out of normal spacetime, rotate them somewhere “up” in the fifth or sixth dimensions, drop them back . . .
Depending on the geometry of that rotation, you might reemerge safely, but with your heart switched to the right side of your body.
Or you might end up like Subcommander Maria Francesca. Fisher, with the rest of her company, had seen the surveillance vids of that attack on Ad Astra’s CAS—evidence that the Andromedan Dark was at least partially a denizen of higher dimensions.
If she hadn’t already been retching, the thought of Francesca would have gotten her there anyway.
“Stand fast, Marine,” Kaplan told her. “Backup is on the way.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” She unsealed her helmet and pulled it free . . . not the smartest thing to do, perhaps, when she might be under attack at any second, but she was choking on her own vomit. Desperately, she cleared her mouth and nose, her eyes fastened all the while on that closed access hatch. Was that thing inside that compartment, the thing that had grabbed Chavez, going to come through?
A Marine fireteam arrived moments later . . . Drummond, Linkowicz, Zhou, and with Gunnery Sergeant Martin Foley in the lead. “Stand down, Fish,” he told her. “You’re relieved.”
“It . . . it’s still in there. . . .”
The fireteam took up positions bracketing the hatch, weapons at the ready, and Foley triggered the electronics to open it. The hatch slid aside.
“That’s . . . impossible. . . .” Fisher said.
The compartment was empty, save for the quietly humming silver box of the router, the ranks upon ranks of bundled fiber-optics.
“I swear to God, Fish,” Foley said. “If you’ve been jack-braining yourself into fuckin’ e-psychosis—”
“No way, Gunny! I haven’t! I swear, that technician just . . . he just . . . it was horrible!”
“Then where is he?”
“Exactly! Check the logs—Chavez had to have keyed in, and yet he’s gone. I swear,” she said again, “he dee-verted!”
“Company, Foley. Corpsman front!”
“There’s something here, Gunny,” one of the Marines said, moving cautiously into the open compartment.
“Whatcha got, Linkowicz?”
The Marine pulled something shiny from the router and held it up for all to see. “Looks like a robotic arm!”
“Shit, man,” Drummond said. “That’s the guy’s link implants!”
Slender strips of metal were sticking out of the router access, the inorganic remnants of Chavez’s arm cleanly stripped of every scrap of flesh. Linkowicz handed the collection of cybernetic parts to Foley. “How the hell . . . ?”
“Hold it, guys,” Foley said. “I’m getting orders . . . we have to shut the unit down.”
“Shut it down?” Linkowicz said. “How?”
&nb
sp; “Stick your arm in that slot and palm the contact. Give it a code, ‘Alpha-zero-zero-one and—’”
“Fuck, man!” Linkowicz said, pushing back from the router. “You gotta be kiddin’, Gunny! I ain’t putting nothing in there!”
Foley sighed. “Hold this,” he said, handing the arm to Zhou.
“What are you doing, Gunny?”
“I won’t order my people to do something I won’t do myself.” He locked his M-290 in its carry position on his armor and drifted through the hatchway.
“Jesus, Gunny!” Drummond said. “You don’t have to prove nothing to us!”
“Yeah, Gunny!” Zhou added. “Damn it, they don’t pay you to take point!”
“You volunteering?”
No one said anything.
“Then just shut the hell up and watch my six.”
He bumped up against the silver casing of the router and pressed a contact on his left wrist that exposed part of the palm of his glove. Reaching into the open access panel, he pressed the exposed portion against the internal contact. “Transmitting,” he said, and a small, green LED on the side of the router casing winked out. Foley pulled his hand out, shaking it as if to convince himself that it was still attached. He turned in place, and Fisher could see his relieved grin through his visor. “Well, that wasn’t so bad—”
The light winked back on all by itself.
“What the fuck—” Fisher exclaimed, grabbing for her weapon, and then the entire router compartment seemed to rotate forward, unfolding as it did so as though it were turning itself inside out. Gray-black blobs of matter materialized around Foley, closing on him. . . .
“Clear the fire zone, Gunny!” Drummond yelled, bringing up his pulse rifle and triggering it in a single, fluid motion. The bolt seared alien flesh, releasing a cloud of acrid smoke; the flesh-masses winked out, jerked back into a higher dimensional plane.
But more began materializing out of empty air, things like uncoiling tentacles and irregular amoebic blobs and impossibly twisted shapes. Foley kicked off from the server and sailed out of the compartment. “Open fire! Open fire!” he was screaming, and the other Marines opened up with their pulse weapons in a steady, hammering barrage. Smoke boiled from the compartment, twisted by the alien hypergeometry into a spiral, and somewhere in the spiral depths something enormous, something far larger than that closet-sized router compartment, was emerging from the dark.
