Forsaken Skies

by D. Nolan Clark

  “Wait! Stop! Let me try to understand,” Valk begged. “You’re—you’re not even military?”

  Return flag: true.

  “You’re…you’re just a miner. Just like Engineer Derrow.”

  Unknown designation.

  “She’s—she’s one of the people on Niraya. The people you tried to kill. But you say that’s your function. To extract resources.” He tried to imagine it, the alien fleet, all those killing machines. Except…they weren’t, were they? On Aruna they’d found worker drones and factories for making the killer landers—except, the killer landers looked like just larger, less functional versions of the worker drones. The mine on Aruna had been defended by smelting towers repurposed to be plasma cannons. The scout drones they’d fought so many times had been pathetically bad at dogfighting—but they would work great as welders and metal cutters.

  Valk’s mind reeled with it. Was it even possible? The genocidal fleet hadn’t come to Niraya to kill everybody. It had come to…what? Mine and extract resources. To build copies of itself.

  Even as he understood that, more data came in—more information from the queenship’s avatar. Information he hadn’t asked for, information he didn’t know how to ask for, poured into him. And he got it. He understood.

  Space is very, very, very big, and it takes a long time to travel from one star to another. Especially if you don’t have access to wormholes. Sometime in the past, some alien—an actual alien, not a drone—had built the millipede-thing, the queenship, and sent it out into space to look for new habitable planets. If it found them it was supposed to extract resources and build infrastructure, so that when the aliens arrived themselves, they’d find prefabricated colonies waiting for them.

  Except what happens if you send your machines out into space and they don’t find a suitable planet? There were millions of stars in the galaxy with no planets at all, billions with planets that couldn’t support life. You would have wasted centuries and have nothing to show for it. So you do exactly what life and evolution did back on Earth: You give your drones the power of reproduction. One drone fleet arrives at a planet and sets up shop. Then it builds, say, ten—no, fifteen—copies of itself and sends each of them out with the same mission. Those fifteen copies each build fifteen more. Eventually one of those copies will find the perfect system, one with lots of habitable planets, plentiful resources, just the right temperature, and plenty of water and all the things you’d want in a new home. In fact, as your machines multiplied throughout the galaxy, they would find hundreds, even thousands of systems like that.

  “You’re an explorer,” Valk said.

  High-order operational parameters include: move, expand through galaxy. Find planets and—

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I just said. Damn. This is a mess. This is…How long have you been out here, following your program?”

  Time server calculations complicated by relativistic dilation. Subjective time server reports: 2.17 galactic rotations.

  Valk did the calculation in his head without even trying. It took the galaxy about 250 million years to rotate, so…the alien machine had been traveling the galaxy for half a billion years.

  Forget humans. On Earth, creatures with spinal cords hadn’t even existed when this thing left home. For a second Valk was overcome by a wave of awe at what its creators had done. Did they even still exist? Had they wiped themselves out millions of years ago, and forgotten to turn off their machines? They certainly had never had a grudge against humanity, a species they couldn’t even have imagined someday existing. The aliens had never meant to kill the Nirayans, or any humans, they had…

  No. Just because it was an accident, that didn’t excuse all those dead farmers.

  “You failed in your mission,” Valk told the millipede-thing. “You’ve deviated from your program. You were supposed to talk to any…any minds you found. Not kill them.”

  Reloading requested data: No minds encountered—

  “What do you call those Nirayans you killed? They had minds, they—”

  Return flag: false.

  Valk stared down at the molten core of the queenship. It was all he could do. “I don’t understand. Your programming requires you to talk to other minds. But you didn’t even try! You just killed the first humans you found, you—”

  Loading operational parameters, subroutine 61D341A: maintenance of work areas. Keep work areas clean of debris and castings. Scan for damage to equipment and repair where resources available. Eliminate vermin that may damage equipment.

  “I didn’t ask for your task list. I asked why you killed those—”

  Reloading requested data: eliminate vermin.

  Ehta shut down all the displays. The tender could send any new information directly to her suit, and just then she didn’t want to be alone. She climbed out of the tender’s hatch and watched the gun crews running around the base camp. The guns weren’t firing as fast as they had before—it took her a second to remember that half of them had been destroyed—and she was grateful that they didn’t make her head spin so much. She headed over to where Engineer Derrow leaned on a console, looking like she was about to collapse.

  Elder McRae was over there, rubbing the engineer’s back through her suit. “Is there some new information?” the old woman asked, as Ehta came up. “Please tell me there’s some good news.”

  Ehta just bit her lip and sent her files over to the engineer’s equipment. A display lit up in front of them, showing the slowly spreading cone of orbiters headed for Aruna, and the squad of drone ships that wove and flitted around it, protecting it.

  “Good news? No.”

  The elder and the engineer stared at the display in shock. Ehta didn’t blame them. She took a step back, letting them process what was coming for them. Only then did she notice the green pearl in the corner of her vision. It was a paler shade than usual, which meant she was being added as a silent connection to an ongoing communication. Zhang had patched her in, but kept her line muted. Clearly she was supposed to hear what was being said—whether other parties in the connection wanted her to or not.

  “—need you here, there could be…I don’t know,” Ehta heard Lanoe say. “Something could break and I’ll need you then, need everybody I can get to—”

  “If you don’t let me go down there,” Zhang said, “they will die. All of them. Roan, and the elder. The people who hired you for this job in the first place.”

  “I wasn’t hired. I volunteered.”

  “So did Ehta. She’s down there. You remember her? Your squadmate?”

  “Ehta,” Lanoe said.

  He sounded very far away.

  “You know how to push my buttons, Zhang. I’ll give you that. But I know you, too. I know that if I order you to stay, you will,” Lanoe said.

  It took Zhang long enough to answer that it was obvious he was right.

  “If we all have to die here,” she said, finally, “I want to die fighting to save the people I care about.”

  Lanoe grunted in frustration. Ehta could see him in her mind’s eye, shaking his head back and forth that way he did when somebody pointed out that he was wrong, and he didn’t want to admit it.

  The funny thing about Aleister Lanoe was that when you backed him into a corner like that, when you forced his hand, you would expect him to lash out. To get defiant and angry and refuse to listen to reason. Just like anybody else. Except—sometimes he didn’t.

  “Go,” he said. “Go. And come back as fast as you can. I’m not ready to give up, not yet. I’m not ready for any of us to just lie down and die. But go—go save Ehta.”

  “Vermin.” Like rats chewing on cables. Like birds fouling a construction site. That was how the aliens saw human life. Something that needed to be eradicated so work could proceed unhindered. There was no ethical question there—it was like spraying for bugs. “Vermin,” he said again. “They were not vermin! They were people…they were people with minds and lives and…”

  Return flag: false
.

  “You have to understand. I know you’re just a machine, maybe the distinction doesn’t mean anything to you. But I have to make you understand—the people out there, the ones you’re trying to kill, they’re not vermin. You can’t just wipe them out. They’re not just rats…” He tried desperately to find a way to make the millipede-thing understand. “Rats don’t build spaceships!”

  Second-order operational parameters include: adjust value definitions based on new data. Space-going vermin discovered during seventh iteration. Logged: vermin definition expanded to include: organic units capable of damaging or polluting work areas. Vermin definition includes organic units found on ground or in space.

  Valk grunted in frustration. “You encountered…space-going vermin,” he said. Meaning people—not human people, but people—in spaceships. “And you’re supposed to exterminate vermin. So you send your, your welders—the scouts—after these vermin. But I don’t understand—what about the interceptors? Those aren’t construction machines.”

  Return flag: true.

  “You had to build those—design those—specifically to attack spaceships. It never occurred to you that the things you were attacking were sapient? And what about the landers? Those things are designed for nothing but killing!”

  Logged: during ninety-twelfth iteration, space-going vermin proved more persistent and organized than expected. Required developing new tools to fulfill subroutine 61D341A.

  “Ninety-twelfth,” Valk said, confused until he remembered this thing thought in base fifteen. “You saw spaceships and you couldn’t understand they were built by sapient creatures. They were just tougher vermin than you’d encountered before. So…you just attack anything alive? Anything you find that’s alive, not a machine, is vermin? That’s crazy,” Valk insisted. “That’s just crazy.”

  The millipede-thing didn’t seem to understand. He realized that he’d spoken but only half his words had been translated into machine-speak. There was no word for “crazy” in the alien machine’s databases.

  No. A computer couldn’t be crazy. It would be buggy, instead.

  Valk cursed himself. He’d wasted all this time learning about the machines when he should have been making demands. “I want to talk to your programmer,” he said. That had been the whole point of threatening the queenship, after all—Engineer Derrow felt there had to be a programmer onboard, someone who could give the drones the command to stand down. “Where is your programmer? Is there one here, or not?”

  Communication request has been sent, logged.

  Okay. Okay, then. Maybe—maybe there was a chance, still. Maybe if he could just talk to the programmer, get it to understand…maybe.

  Seconds ticked away while he waited. Would the programmer come to meet him in person? Was he going to get to see an alien? Would it even understand him, or would he have to communicate through its drone?

  More seconds. Too many. “Are they coming?” he asked.

  Request could not be processed.

  The damned machine didn’t understand. “How long until the programmer responds?” he tried.

  Due to signal lag, response expected in: twenty-one thousand, two hundred, seventeen [years].

  Oh, no.

  No. The bastards—they hadn’t sent a programmer along with their queenship. The nearest programmer who could alter the queenship’s programming was living on some distant planet, still. Valk’s request to talk would have to be sent across light-millennia of space, and even then the reply wouldn’t come for thousands of years more.

  The battle outside the queenship would be over in a matter of hours, maybe minutes. Niraya would be sterilized of “vermin” within the next few days.

  “Damn you! Damn you damned machine bastard! Hell’s ashes, don’t you understand? Can’t you see we’re not vermin? Can’t you see I’m not vermin?”

  Return flag: true.

  “What?”

  Confirm: false-mind excluded from class: vermin.

  “But I’m—I’m human. I’m just like the people you’re trying to kill. I’m one of them. I’m vermin!”

  Return flag: false. False-mind, you are false-mind.

  “Damn it, what does that even mean?”

  Full communication impossible {this unit/false-mind} while mind is false. False-mind contains personality ideates that resist full communication.

  “I don’t understand! What the hell is an ideate?”

  Define term: ideate: constructed falsehood implemented to simulate false-consciousness. Remove personality ideates to facilitate full communication {this unit/false-mind}.

  “Remove what?” Valk demanded.

  The millipede thing reached down then with several of its thinner legs and gripped Valk’s left index finger.

  Minimize damage to false-mind. Remove personality ideates incrementally, until false-mind allows full communication.

  With no effort at all, the millipede-thing ripped Valk’s finger out from its socket and cast it away, into the molten core.

  Then there was no room in Valk’s mind for anything but pain, bright white pain that strobed behind his eyes, bounced back and forth inside his skull. He tried to scream, tried to convulse in agony, but the millipede-thing wouldn’t let him. Instead it reached for his thumb.

  A white pearl appeared in the corner of Valk’s vision. It spun and flashed and jumped up and down, begging for his attention. If he just flicked his eyes across it—

  He’d resisted doing that for seventeen years.

  If there had ever been a time when he deserved painkillers, though, this was it. He moved his eyes. Accepted the white pearl.

  He didn’t expect that it would switch everything off. His consciousness, his thoughts, his memories. Everything. Like rolling up a minder and putting it in sleep mode.

  Just gone.

  Chapter Thirty

  Light. White light.

  A room, not big. Not much in it. Very clean. A drone moved through the room, its ducted props whispering away. It was painted in Establishment colors, blue with black stars. It shone a light that flickered across him and then it floated out of view. Somewhere nearby, someone tapped on a virtual keyboard.

  Then she stepped into frame. A woman, long brown hair in a thick braid that fell down over one shoulder. Sad eyes.

  He wanted to comfort her. Why? Did he know her? Did he know why she looked so sad? He couldn’t remember. There were holes in him.

  Holes all the way through him. Places where there should have been something. A memory, a thought, a feeling. Nothing there, though. Just holes.

  Nothing hurt.

  “I’m not supposed to turn you on yet,” she said. She scratched at her nose. Looked over at the drone. “I’m not supposed to talk to you. You aren’t supposed to know that I exist. It’s okay. I’ll encrypt this when I’m done, so you won’t remember. My name is Yalta. Colonel Engineer Yalta. Can you…can you speak?”

  He couldn’t. There was a hole where his ability to speak should be.

  “It’s okay. Just listen, I guess. First things first. I’m so sorry.”

  There was no hole in his empathy. He wanted to reach over and grab her hand. It wasn’t possible.

  There was a hole where his hand should be.

  “Tannis—I’m sorry. What we’re doing to you, it’s not…It isn’t ethical. I understand why they want me to do this but it’s…” She shook her head. “Orders are orders, right? You have to understand, we’re losing. The polys just have so much money to throw at this war, and all we have is people. People we can’t afford to lose. That’s the point of this, I guess. We can’t afford to lose you.”

  Yalta stepped out of the frame again. He wished she would come back. He wished he could tell her it was all right. That they were going to lose, that he’d seen the future somehow. Knew what was going to happen with the Establishment, and that it was going to be bad, really bad actually, but that most of them would live through it.

  “Admiral Ukiyo gave me a very long lect
ure about propaganda this morning,” she said. Her voice was muffled as if she was very far away. “About appearances. About heroes. She said the Establishment is an idea, not an armada or a place or a political philosophy, but an idea. An idea that needs to be fed to keep it alive. She told me the only way we can win this thing is if people believe. So that’s why we have to…”

  Yalta’s voice trailed off. She was gone for a long time, as the drone moved across his field of view again. Eventually it wandered off, and she came back, closer now. Looking right into his eyes.

  “I can’t lie to you, Tannis. I’ve spent too long going through your memories, learning who you are. You’re a good man and you don’t deserve to be lied to. So I’m going to tell you the truth.

  “You died. You burned to death in your cockpit. I’ve reviewed the memories and they were awful. I…I cried. I cried for you, Tannis. I’ve edited those memories down as much as I could, made them…shorter. You died in that fire and when your ship came back to the carrier you were already gone. Fourth-degree burns over one hundred percent of your body. All that was left, really, was your brain, and even that was cooked. We had a hell of a time scanning it.

  “We had our orders. Admiral Ukiyo told us to scan you, and download your memories, your consciousness, your you-ness, into a new body. Of course, we don’t have the ability to put you in a living, human body; that’s poly technology and we can’t afford it. So instead…we’re going to put you inside a drone.

  “Two of us quit from the project then and there. It’s against every principle we have as scientists. Two of us quit from the team and they were arrested on the spot. The rest of us did what we were told.

  “They’re going to make you a hero. They’ve worked up a whole story around you; they’re going to call you the Blue Devil and they’re going to pretend you lived through that fire, that you’re a perfect representative of the Establishmentarian ideal. Tough as nails, unwilling to surrender.

  “They’re going to put you in a suit with a black helmet, and put you back in a fighter so they can take video of you, the pilot who refused to die. When the war is over, when we win,” Yalta said, unable not to sneer at the improbability, “they’ll let you die for a second time. Give you a proper burial and maybe a statue or something.