Drifter's War

by William C. Dietz

  Dee imagined cool water splashing against her skin and ran her tongue over parched lips. This was torture. It would be better to think of something else.

  Sorenson had a terrific hangover, and the heat made it worse, but he didn't say anything. The guilt of what he'd done, not only to Melissa, but to his friends, weighed heavily on his mind. He wanted to say something, wanted to apologize, but knew it wouldn't do any good. If only…

  Man-made thunder rumbled about them and the entire cargo module shook. Cap jumped to his feet and Dee looked out the door. It was a ship, a big one, a destroyer from the look of her, and headed their way. The warship's repellors roared as she rode them across the surface of the spaceport to settle a thousand yards away. Dust and dirt swirled as the vessel settled onto massive landing jacks. The repellors made a loud pop as the pilot turned them off. Metal creaked as it started to cool.

  Dee eyed the ship suspiciously. What was this? Coincidence or something more? All of the other military ships were parked on the far side of the spaceport within their own area. Why park this one next to the tender?

  A hatch opened, half a dozen navy personnel spilled out, and started to work on some routine maintenance procedures. Was it real? Or just for show? And what about those weapons turrets? Was it just Dee's imagination, or were a significant number of them lined up on the tender?

  Dee wiped the sweat from her forehead and wished that she'd allowed for some sort of escape route.

  Another hour passed. Then two. Cap had started to doze. Both of them were startled when a maintenance bot appeared, whirred into the module, took a coupling from one of the bins, and left. It seemed completely unaware of their existence.

  Dee forced herself to relax. It made sense. The maintenance bot had the single-minded programming of a Terran ant. Go there, do that, and ignore everything else.

  The sun started to set. The air inside the cargo module began to cool. The technicians disappeared and were replaced by a sentry and a tired-looking surveillance bot. It made endless paths around the destroyer's landing jacks sniffing the air for smells that shouldn't be there, monitoring the ground for signs of tunneling, and listening for suspicious sounds. All useful things to do on some rim world but more than a little silly in the middle of a major spaceport.

  Still, regulations are regulations, and sniffers are SOP for a class three alert. Dee had been a marine and knew all about class three alerts. It reinforced her earlier impression. The destroyer was there for a reason.

  The Imperial consul came to mind. A personage with more than enough power to move destroyers around and the motive to do so. The drifter, and the technology it contained, would serve as a powerful incentive. Besides, the consul had no way to know that Lando was innocent, so he saw himself as performing a public service as well.

  Then, as if to erase any possible doubt, a pair of robo-cams appeared. They swooped out of the twilight like bats and circled the tender. Dee couldn't hear the dialogue but could imagine what it would be like.

  "And so here it is… the ship that the killer's heading for. No one thinks that he'll make it as far as Brisco City, but they aren't taking any chances and have a destroyer in position just in case…"

  Dee saw the sniffer point an antenna toward the robo-cams, saw the sentry become agitated, and knew some vidcasters were catching hell from the navy. The air between the spaceport and the vid station would be red-hot. She could imagine a hurried close.

  "Well, folks, that's it for right now. We'll bring you more when there's more to bring. This is so and so, for news such and such, see you at ten."

  The cameras zoomed away and vanished into the gathering darkness.

  Dee walked to the rear of the cargo module, fumbled around in the darkness, and found what she was looking for. Two rumpled grease-stained coveralls. She threw one to Sorenson. "Here, put that on."

  Cap started to say something, started to object, but one look at Dee froze the words in his throat. Any authority he had was aboard Junk. Sorenson stepped into the overalls and pulled them up around his shoulders.

  "Stand still."

  Cap obeyed as Dee smeared number-four grease on his face and hands. She did the same thing to herself.

  "There… now grab some tools and follow me." Dee slipped out the door and Cap followed. Sorenson felt his heart skip a beat as Dee waved to the sentry and he waved back.

  Then they were walking along together, marching toward the distant lights, two techs on their way home. The air was cooler now and rumbled with the sound of a distant lift-off.

  Sorenson felt a terrible thirst but knew he wouldn't get any sympathy from Dee. He asked a question instead. "What now?"

  Dee had appropriated a rather heavy toolbox. She shifted it from one hand to the other. "That's simple. We find ourselves a ship, intercept Melissa and Pik, and take off."

  Sorenson shook his head doubtfully. "That doesn't sound easy to me."

  Dee's eyes were on the lights up ahead. "I never said it would be 'easy.' I said it would be 'simple.'"

  Sorenson nodded agreeably but couldn't see the difference.

  5

  There was no way to tell what the compartment had originally been used for. It was oval, lined with some sort of light green spongy material, and made sounds when you touched it.

  Pik thought it was some sort of zero-G music room, where the builders had composed music by bouncing off the walls, but Cap had disagreed. He said the room was a computer terminal where sound stood in for numbers and the aliens had performed sophisticated calculations.

  Cy Borg didn't care. He was lonely, bored, and more than a little pissed. If cyborgs can be pissed, which Cy felt sure they could, since borgs feel things the same way other humans do. He propelled himself toward a wall, heard a B flat, and bounced off.

  His anger stemmed from the fact that Cap, Melissa, Pik, and Della had departed for Pylax without him. Someone had to stay aboard the drifter, and since Cy knew the most about the drifter's inner workings he was elected. They needed him aboard the drifter. That's what they said anyway.

  But Cy knew better. He knew what they really thought. They were afraid that he'd get them all in trouble. They knew his history, how he'd gambled his organs away, until only his brain was left. And they'd been present when representatives of the gamblers' guild had come after him for unpaid debts. Debts that had landed Pik and Melissa in jail.

  So he had a problem with gambling? So what? Cap was a world-champion drunk, Pik was wanted for murder, and Della was little more than a hired killer. Who were they to tell him what to do?

  "No," Cy concluded out loud, "my body may be different… but my emotions are the same. And I'm pissed."

  So saying, the cyborg spun in midair and headed for the drifter's control room. He'd promised not to experiment with the ship's controls while the rest of them were gone but it wouldn't hurt to look. Besides, there wasn't anything else to do, and why should they have all the fun?

  Cy aimed his globular body toward the nearest hatch and zoomed through the passageway beyond. He extruded both vid pickups and added more speed. Certain pleasures were lost to him, sex being the most noticeable, but others had taken their place.

  And first and foremost among those pleasures was three-dimensional movement. Thanks to a small antigrav unit, and jets of compressed air, Cy could move in ways that most people never dreamed of. Zero G is one thing, but ah, freedom within gravity… that's something else.

  And thanks to his metal casing and internal oxygen supply, Cy could survive in space without a suit. Yes, there were advantages to being a cyborg, though Cy would have returned to his original body in a second had that been possible.

  Cy shot out of the passageway into a large open space. Dense foliage grew to the right and left. Rain drummed on his metal casing. Unlike humans, and the aliens encountered so far, the builders had equipped their ship with a self-maintaining biosphere. The drifter boasted a desert, grasslands, and a small forest full of double-trunked trees. The artif
icial gravity was slightly less than Terran norm, and the air was generally more humid than Cy liked, the exceptions being the desert and certain equipment bays.

  The rain turned to mist as Cy left the grasslands and approached the forest. The forest never failed to interest him. There were the strange double-trunked trees for one thing, their puffy foliage growing off perfectly straight limbs, each one a perfect replica of all the others.

  Then there were the paths, dozens of them, that wound in and around the trees and served as highways for a variety of small animals. Cy and his companions had caught and examined some of them. None were real. Like the birds that fluttered between the trees, and the insects that buzzed through the air, the animals were robots. Sophisticated robots, yes, and potentially quite valuable, but mindless things that were more decorative than useful.

  The engineer in Cy ached to take one of them apart but knew he shouldn't. What if there was some sort of sophisticated relationship between them and the ship that hadn't been discovered yet? No, it was way too dangerous.

  The most interesting part of the forest were the nest-beds. That's what Cy called them anyway, and the name seemed to fit. They were depressions really, long indentations in the ground that were padded with mossy stuff and covered with brightly colored pieces of fabric, Pieces of fabric that looked like blankets.

  The similarity to a bed was undeniable and evocative as well. The nest-beds caused Cy to see the long-vanished builders as something more than the super-intellects they undoubtedly were.

  Their ruins could be found throughout known space, fragments of a once great civilization that had existed untold thousands of years before. A civilization that had inexplicably vanished leaving no graveyards, no tombs, no images of what its creators had looked like.

  Oh, archaeologists and xeno-anthropologists had created computer-derived holos based on logical extrapolation, but that left a lot to be desired. They were tall and skinny, anyone who looked at one of their doorways could see that, but what did they feel like? Did they have eyes? And if so, what would you see in them? Love? Hate? There was no way to tell.

  That's why the nest-beds were so important. They spoke of comfort, of a need for rest, of a desire for security. It would be easy to go further than that, to assume that they slept in forests on their native planet, but that might be wrong.

  After all, back when sex had meant something, Cy had spent time in a pleasure dome or two. He remembered sleeping under a tangle of gymnastic equipment on a heart-shaped bed. What would some enterprising alien xeno-anthropologist make of that thousands of years later? Would he, or she, or it, conclude that humans worshiped circulatory organs and liked to perform calisthenics just prior to rest?

  No, it was better to stay within bounds, to conclude that the builders needed rest and found it within an artificial forest.

  Cy picked up speed and skimmed the side of the vessel's hull. It was covered by a mosslike growth. The cyborg knew from previous experimentation that the underlying hull material was not only conductive but heavily laden with electronic activity. Somewhere, and none of them knew where, an extremely sophisticated artificial intelligence was using the hull to route electronic signals throughout the hull. Cy wasn't positive, but was fairly sure, that power was distributed the same way.

  Thanks to the special hull the builders had been able to dispense with the need for wire, cable, and conduit. It was absolutely amazing, and more than that, a technological treasure trove for anyone who owned it.

  Cy smiled inside. When the negotiations were over he'd be very wealthy. Wealthy enough to buy his own casino and get the odds on his side for a change.

  The biosphere came to an end and funneled the cyborg into a sizable lock. As always the ship sensed Cy's presence and knew exactly what to do. The lock closed and opened two minutes later. Cy felt the usual sense of anticipation as he squirted himself out into the alien control room. The cyborg braked and took a moment to look around.

  The control room was completely unlike those found on human ships. It was simpler for one thing, with none of the control panels, vid screens, instrument readouts, computer keyboards, and other systems that Cy was used to.

  There were ten black globes. Each globe sat on a white pedestal and had its own chair. The chairs were high and narrow. Taken together the globes formed a perfect circle.

  Cy found the arrangement interesting because it seemed to imply a meeting of equals in which everyone shared the same amount of responsibility for the ship's safety. Such reasoning could be terribly flawed, of course, but what the heck, he had as much right to speculate as anyone else. More since he was aboard and they weren't.

  Cy squirted himself over to the nearest globe. He remembered the first time he'd entered the control room, how he'd reached out to touch one of the globes and been surprised when his pincer went right through its seemingly solid surface.

  There had been a brief moment of disorientation followed by the knowledge that he was somewhere else. Somewhere inside the vessel's biocontrol system, sampling the ship's atmosphere, and balancing evaporation against rainfall.

  It was utterly fantastic! A ship you could control from the inside out!

  The first experiment led to more as Cy raced from globe to globe finding and identifying controls for the power plants, the mysterious green blobs that could fling themselves outward from the hull, and the ship itself.

  Cy eyed the globe in front of him. It provided access to the ship's NAVCOMP. Well, the builders called it something else no doubt, but a navigational computer is a navigational computer is a navigational computer.

  The cyborg wanted to dip a pincer into it, wanted to enter the knowledge that it contained, wanted to know where the ship had been. Where had the ship come from? What happened to the crew? There was the very real possibility that the drifter's NAVCOMP could answer all of those questions and many more.

  But that sort of knowledge was extremely valuable, and thought-driven controls have a down side as well. What if the cyborg unknowingly erased a portion of the NAVCOMP's memory? Or entered the mental equivalent of static? Or any of a thousand other possibilities? That's why the others had forbidden Cy to go skinny-dipping in the drifter's data banks.

  But that was silly. Cy extended a pincer until it was only an inch shy of the globe's gleaming surface. Anyone intelligent enough to build a ship like the drifter would have built safeguards into its computer systems. No, it wouldn't do to have unauthorized types fiddling around with things and causing trouble. The others were worry warts, that's all, quick to indulge their own pleasures, while limiting his. Cy stuck his pincer through the surface of the globe.

  Suddenly, and without effort, Cy was the ship. A single drop within the endless ocean of space, a string of coordinates expressed in sounds he didn't understand, and a purpose that felt like reaching. Exploring? Wanting? Gathering? All seemed to fit but none were sufficient by themselves.

  Now the ship found and identified him. Thoughts came his way. They hurt the cyborg's mind like high-frequency sounds can hurt human ears. Word pictures bounced back and forth between the walls of his mind.

  "YES? YES? YES?"

  Cy flinched inside his metal shell. He found it hard to focus his thoughts. "I want knowledge."

  A tidal wave of sounds, numbers, images, and ideas washed over the cyborg and tumbled him under.

  "CHOOSE. CHOOSE. CHOOSE." The words reverberated through Cy's brain like a giant ringing of bells.

  Cy swam up from the bottom, trying to breathe, suffocating on the knowledge around him. Information flowed in through his mouth, nose, and ears, filled his throat, and packed lungs that he no longer had. He couldn't breathe. The cyborg screamed.

  "No! It's too much! Stop!"

  The storm was gone as suddenly as it had come. Cy was left floating on the very surface of a gently undulating sea. There was no sun as such, only a warm hazy light that came from somewhere and nowhere all at the same time.

  Cy lay there for a moment
, recovering his composure and organizing his thoughts. He'd asked for knowledge and the computer had responded. The fault was his. Instead of asking a precise question, such as "Where are we now?" he'd been way too general. Okay, no problem. One well-framed question coming up.

  "What happened to this ship's crew?"

  "CHOOSE. CHOOSE. CHOOSE."

  Cy swore softly. The computer didn't know or needed a different kind of question. The cyborg tried a different tack. He visualized a sun.

  "Would you agree that this is a sun?"

  "YES. YES. YES. Type 3vb890123/4A."

  Cy smiled internally. All right! Now he was getting somewhere. He summoned up a planet. It had small polar caps, a lot of blue water, and ragged brown islands.

  "And this is a planet?"

  "YES. YES. YES. Type 7jc465-XX79."

  Cy felt almost faint with excitement. He was close, so very close. Just one more question and he'd know something people had been after for hundreds of years. The location of the builder's home world, or if not that, then something almost as good: a potentially unplundered artifact planet.

  "Which planet was this ship built on?"

  There was a mind-numbing blur as thousands of images whipped through Cy's mind like a tape on high-speed rewind. Then it was there, a crystal-clear vision, floating against the backdrop of space.

  It was an ordinary-looking planet, with large polar caps, no oceans to speak of, and a single globe-spanning continent. Cy felt a sense of disappointment. He had expected something more. Something worthy of a superior race. A paradise perhaps, or the ruins of one, anything but an ordinary-looking planet. Oh, well, you can't win 'em all.

  "How about the surface? Can you show me the way the surface of the planet looked when this ship left it?"

  "YES. YES. YES."

  Cy found himself in orbit, looking down through some sort of electronic magnification, scanning the surface below. By simply wanting it the cyborg could zoom down to examine a single stone or pull back to view an entire mountain range.