Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  Nathan saw the crowd of inmates looking around at the shattered block as though they were suddenly coming awake from a bad dream. Volt’s smile returned, more cold and brutal than before.

  ‘You think that they care?’ he challenged. ‘We’s all here for life, for one reason or th’other. How long our sentences are don’t matter to us, ‘cause you can’t get more than life unless you’re one of those damned Holosap freaks!’

  Ripples and murmurs of agreement rippled through the crowd, but Nathan shook his head.

  ‘Those Holosap freaks don’t have to spend their lives cooped up in this stinking hole with people like you,’ he pointed out. ‘They get to live more than one life in complete freedom out there. That’s something people like you will never have again, Volt. You’re done, no matter how many people you kill in here.’

  ‘Well now, that ain’t quite the truth,’ Volt replied, ‘because we ain’t stayin’ in here no longer, right boys?’

  A cheer went up from the cons once again Volt’s men and swallowing whatever deranged and insane plan he had devised. Nathan knew that he must have lied to them somehow to get them to follow him in a riot on a space station prison from which they could not hope to escape.

  ‘What crap did you feed those boys of yours to convince them to follow you on your suicidal little riot, Volt?’

  ‘None at all,’ Volt snapped, and then from below the watch tower Nathan saw Volt’s two bearded thugs drag a captured prison officer out into view. ‘Y’see, if we don’t get what we want, we’ll start executin’ these folks one after th’other.’

  Nathan saw the guard’s battered face, his uniform ripped and torn and bloodied, his legs weak with fear and loathing. Volt crouched down alongside the prostrate guard and looked up at Nathan as he held the edge of the steel mirror to the man’s throat.

  ‘So, how ‘bout it, Ironside?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Xavier said as he stood forward, his eyes fixed on the captured guard. ‘You don’t need to hurt him.’

  ‘The armory,’ Volt snapped. ‘You can open it from up there! We want the weapons, and we want a shuttle out of Tethys in one hour!’

  Xavier looked pleadingly at Nathan, but it was Allen who answered. ‘You know that he’ll kill the guard anyway, and us, whether you do what he wants or not.’

  ‘I can’t let him murder that officer,’ Xavier whispered. ‘I can’t stand by and let him do that.’

  ‘You can’t stop him either,’ Nathan pointed out. ‘No matter what you say, Volt will kill him.’

  Xavier bit his lip, his features twisted with anguish as he looked down and saw the guard trying to squirm away from the jagged blade.

  ‘I’m runnin’ out of patience!’ Volt yelled.

  The mirror’s saw–tooth edge pressed against the guard’s throat and he let out a cry of pain as it bit into his flesh, blood smearing the surface.

  ‘Level Four!’ Xavier shouted, his voice poisoned with regret as he hit a switch in the Watch Tower and a series of red lights turned green. ‘But we can’t get out of the tower to request a shuttle.’

  Volt grinned as he stood up from the guard. ‘We jus’ gonna follow you, blast our way out of that watch tower and then take every block fo’ ourselves. We got hundreds of hostages in here!’

  Nathan frowned, and then he saw the escape line that Xavier had made drop from the vent high above them on the watchtower and swing away from them in a graceful arc. Nathan stepped closer to the window and saw cons on the upper tier with a makeshift hook constructed from thin strips of plastic protruding out across the block.

  The line swung smoothly up to the far gantry, where it was caught by some of Volt’s men.

  ‘Y’all got room in there for some more, stick?’ Volt called in glee.

  ‘The tower’s sealed!’ Nathan called back. ‘There’s no way out of here!’

  ‘There is if we got currency!’ Volt sneered as he pointed to the guard lying at his feet.

  ‘They’re coming in,’ Xavier said.

  Nathan called down to Volt. ‘Let the guard go! That was the deal!’

  Ryan looked down at the stricken man and then he lifted one boot and smashed it down feverishly on the guard’s skull with sickening cracks that seemed to echo around the block. The guard’s skull shattered and several of the watching cons jerked away from the scene as one vomited. The guard’s body fell limp, sprawled across the tiled deck amid a pool of rapidly spilling blood as his dying heart continued to pump inside his chest. Volt looked up at Nathan and chuckled maniacally.

  ‘He’s gone alright!’

  Grim laughter rippled across the block as Xavier turned from the window, one hand over his mouth and his eyes squeezed shut.

  Nathan saw Volt’s bearded henchmen clamber up onto the railings and then one of them launched himself into the air. The thug’s massive form swung across the block to a wave of cheers and then he vanished above the watchtower windows.

  Nathan heard a deep thump and then the bearded thug plummeted past the window, his swing too low for the hatch. Gusts of laughter bellowed out from the crowd as they scattered to avoid the grisly missile, and the bearded man’s body crashed down onto tables to the sound of splintering bones and a roaring cry of agony.

  ‘They’ll figure it out soon enough,’ Xavier said, his features pale and his skin sheened with sweat.

  ‘We gotta make a stand here, now, and hold them off,’ Allen said. ‘It’s the only play we got left.’

  Nathan looked at Allen. ‘I’m sorry, for getting’ you into this.’

  Allen nodded. ‘You can apologize when we get out of here. You got any ideas about how we’re gonna survive long enough?’

  Nathan looked around and saw a rack filled with plasma sticks. He hurried across and grabbed one as he heard another body slam against the wall outside, this time accompanied by cheers of delight and no splintering bones.

  Above them he heard the sound of somebody slithering into the ventilation ducts above the control room, and he threw a plasma stick to Xavier.

  ‘One thrust as they come through,’ he said, ‘then a blow to the head to silence them and save the charge, okay?’

  Xavier nodded, and then suddenly the grill in the ceiling clattered down to the ground and a hulking con thrust his way out of the opening feet first and dropped into the control room.

  ***

  XXVIII

  CSS Titan

  Kaylin Foxx watched as Doctor Schmidt stood in the quarantine cubicle and examined the floor upon which he “stood”. His projection, which was controlled by computers to match whichever of Titan’s many decks he appeared upon, was immune to any kind of biological interference, making him the ideal candidate to examine at close range the bizarre creature now occupying the cubicle. Beyond the translucent walls of the quarantine unit, four Marines stood guard and watched in silence, Lieutenant Foxx, Betty and Vasquez alongside them.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ Vasquez asked.

  Doctor Schmidt did not reply for a moment, absorbed entirely by his study of this fascinating lifeform. Although Foxx could not see it there below him, she knew from a sensor scan of the cubicle that a tiny sheet of residual heat from biological processes covered the entire floor of the unit.

  ‘It’s biological, I think,’ Schmidt replied, ‘and probably capable of infiltrating any life form at the cellular level.’

  Foxx shivered visibly as she looked at the floor of the unit, which would have appeared entirely normal to her had she walked inside. The entity had colored itself to match the existing deck floor, like some kind of strange chameleon.

  ‘This isn’t what I expected first contact to be like,’ she admitted.

  Schmidt walked out of the quarantine unit, his hands behind his back and a smile glowing on his face.

  ‘Most people don’t,’ he agreed. ‘They expect great beasties with evil fangs and tentacles, or emotionless machines with a thirst for human destruction, but the truth is that most advanced an
d spacefaring species that are able to cross entire galaxies would look nothing like what we expect them to, simply because of the time it takes to evolve to the point where galactic travel is possible.’

  Foxx knew from school that it had taken intelligent human life around four and a half billion years to appear on Earth, and that had occurred in a relatively stable solar system in a sedate corner of the Milky Way galaxy’s Orion Arm. Much of the rest of the galaxy was a turbulent milieu of gravitational waves compressing spiral arms into dense clouds of violent star birth, or superheated to millions of degrees in the galaxy’s dark heart, wherein ruled the gargantuan supermassive black hole Sagittarius A.

  Life could not realistically be expected to emerge in these dense, hot, radiation–bathed furnaces, and so mankind looked to similar areas of the galaxy for signs of life around yellow spectral stars like the sun, or long–lived red and brown dwarf star systems, or in globular clusters where millions of suns would fill the sky in a dazzling halo of stars orbited by planetary systems rich in the heavy metals necessary for life.

  ‘So you’re sayin’ that the thing in there must be old,’ Vasquez said, ‘old enough to have evolved beyond human form and into something else?’

  Schmidt nodded.

  ‘Who knows what this life form may once have looked like, but it has clearly progressed to a state that we no longer recognize immediately as life. We’re detecting heat from it and it clearly does indeed have a biological component to it, but right now it’s confined to this cubicle. My team will be here momentarily and we’ll move a sample to my laboratory for closer study.’

  Betty peered at the floor of the unit. ‘Will it know what you’ve done?’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Schmidt chirped. ‘If it’s smart enough to alter its shape to impersonate an Ayleean warrior, it’s more than smart enough to monitor what we’re doing.’

  Foxx thought for a moment as Schmidt’s team arrived. ‘It spoke,’ she said. ‘The Ayleean this thing impersonated, it spoke in English.’

  Schmidt nodded.

  ‘It can learn incredibly quickly,’ he replied, ‘which means we must too if we’re to understand it. If it were not for the sound proofing around that cubicle it would probably be listening to us right now.’

  Foxx watched as Schmidt’s team punctured the cubicle with a small machine designed to coordinate its actions with the field generators of the quarantine unit, gaining access where other forms of material could not. Moments later, it burrowed down into the floor of the cubicle and to her amazement she watched it scoop up a visible section of that floor, revealing the original one beneath it.

  The material was pulled back inside the machine into a smaller, equally powerful quarantine container and the machine’s probe retracted.

  ‘Be quick now,’ Schmidt hurried his team along. ‘I’ll be waiting in the laboratory.’

  Foxx and Vasquez followed the team as Schmidt’s projection disappeared, and they ran through to the laboratories as the team placed the machine inside a second quarantine unit, this one a meter square and filled with a menagerie of robotic arms, tools and scopes.

  Schmidt stood over the quarantine unit and watched as the machine regurgitated the sample into the unit and then backed out. Its surface was swept by a small scanner as it passed through, Foxx figuring that the scanner searched for any signs of remaining contamination by whatever the sample was made from. A small green light illuminated on the edge of the machine and Schmidt humphed in delight.

  ‘Good, that’s the first thing we’ve learned for sure today – whatever it is cannot pass through hard–light structures such as these quarantine units, I’m sure you’ll be relieved to know.’

  Schmidt accessed a remotely controlled microscope and trained it upon the sample, which for now had remained in its form as a section of the quarantine unit’s floor, as though a piece of deck tiling had been chipped off. The doctor leaned close to the scope and observed the sample only for a few moments before he stood back and rested his chin on one hand, supported by his other arm as a deep frown creased his holographic blue features.

  ‘What?’ Vasquez asked.

  Schmidt raised an eyebrow as though he’d already forgotten the detectives were there.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said in reply. ‘The organism is indeed biological, but only partly.’

  ‘Partly?’ Foxx echoed.

  ‘Yes, it appears to consist mostly of quasi–biological components. Spectroscopy reveals them to consist mostly of titanium and certain alloys. In effect, this is neither a creature nor a machine, but something of both.’

  ‘It’s a cyborg?’ Foxx asked.

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ Schmidt nodded. ‘But it is constructed on a nanometer scale, many thousands of them in this one small sample. I believe that this is the first known discovery of a genuine extra–terrestrial artificial superintelligence.’

  ‘A what now?’ Admiral Marshall asked as he strode into the laboratory.

  ‘An artificial superintelligence,’ Schmidt repeated as he stepped away from the quarantine tub so that Marshall could look at the slab of what looked like nothing more than floor tiling inside. ‘Scientists and even philosophers have long contended that any space faring species that was able to visit us here on Earth would be so far advanced that we might not even recognize it for what it is. Many also contend that we would not encounter biological species at all, but machines.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ Foxx said. ‘You’re telling me our fridges will inherit the universe?’

  ‘It’s already happening,’ Schmidt pointed out. ‘Intelligent implants beneath our skins and in our skulls, bio–enhancement, brain impulse therapy, and human beings have been using prosthetic limbs to replace those lost due to injury or illness for hundreds of years. That natural progression from enhancements to permanent improvement, projected well into the future, will inevitably create a race of humans more machine than people, and the constant miniaturization of that technology will inevitably make that race ever smaller and more efficient. Look at me, for instance – as a Holosap I’m really just an entire dead person inside a quantum chip.’

  Betty moved forward and peered in at the sample before them.

  ‘This doesn’t look all that smart to me,’ she said.

  Schmidt nodded.

  ‘I suspect that like the neurons in a human mind or the termites in a mound, an individual unit of this organism is not especially intelligent or capable of what we would consider coherent thought. It is when they come together in sufficient numbers that cognition, although likely very different from our own, sparks into life and awareness. The organism in the main quarantine cubicle will be aware that a sample of its being has been taken, but this much smaller sample will no longer be aware of what or where it is.’

  ‘That’s weird,’ Vasquez uttered.

  ‘That’s useful,’ the admiral countered as he stood up from examining the sample. ‘It means that if we blow it to pieces, it can’t coordinate itself.’

  ‘True,’ Schmidt said, ‘but like any evolutionary species it will have developed defense mechanisms for just such an eventuality. Like a flock of birds it will rejoin itself, perhaps quickly.’

  Marshall thought for a moment.

  ‘You say they’re real small. Do they have any motor function, the ability to move under their own steam?’

  Schmidt looked again into the scope, this time relaying the images within onto a holo–screen nearby. Foxx turned and saw what looked like a soup of cells moving about, as though she were watching tiny bugs in the deep ocean densely packed and probing each other.

  ‘No,’ Schmidt said, ‘they have no visible means of propulsion.’

  Marshall folded his arms. ‘So they can’t easily move about in zero gravity. How would they move in an atmospheric environment?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Schmidt replied, ‘but if I were to hazard a guess I would say that they simply occupy other hosts.’

  ‘Occupy?’ Foxx asked
with another shiver. ‘You mean infect?’

  ‘Yes,’ Schmidt confirmed. ‘They appear in many respects to have evolved to become a parasite, or so their behavior leads me to believe. We can assume that this species is many thousands of years more advanced than our own. When humans experienced the Industrial Revolution they were only a couple hundred years from radio, fifty more to computers, ten more to landing on the moon and so on. The growth was trimetric and now we’re a space faring species with a strong line in technological implants. True artificial intelligence is already within our capabilities as we’ve seen before, and the rise of Holo sapiens shows that our squidgy human brains and our bodies, vulnerable to injury and disease, are already outdated by the technology we’ve introduced. This organism we’ve discovered probably represents where we’ll be in a few thousand years.’

  Betty screwed up her nose in distaste. ‘We’ll pass on that.’

  ‘So what’s it doing here, and why did it attack that Ayleean ship and take down the crew?’ Marshall asked. ‘If this thing is so damned clever, why did it attack us?’

  Schmidt sighed as he replied, looking at the sample in the cubicle and the holo–screen display.

  ‘We are unlikely ever to understand its motivations,’ he said simply. ‘This organism represents a species that has evolved entirely to become a synthetic being with very little biological material remaining. That’s why the life sensors in the escape capsule didn’t detect it – the genetic material remaining was both different in structure to ours and in such small quantities that it didn’t register. Who could possibly understand what motivations a species like this might possess? We can’t even understand what it’s thinking, or whether it actually thinks at all.’

  ‘It thinks enough to impersonate Ayleeans and commit murder,’ Marshall shot back. ‘That makes it an enemy until we know better. Keep working on it.’