Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Kindle Edition, 2014 © Penny Publications
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Championship B'tok
Edward M. Lerner | 14652 words
Chapter 1
By the directed stimulation of neurons, virtual knight captured imaginary pawn.
"Crap," Lyle Logan said. Many thousand championship games uploaded into his neural implant—and not one of them anticipated that gambit.
"Mate in five moves," Corrigan agreed. "And, by the way, we'll arrive before lunch."
Lyle banished the game from his mind's eye. Likewise, his opponent, with the perpetual devil-may-care smirk. Wearing a snug leather helmet, its chinstraps dangling, and aviator goggles. Seated in the open cockpit of some dawn-of-flight biplane. As AI avatars went, that wasn't especially ironic. Corrigan might have been out walking on the virtual wing.
Lyle told himself, yet again, that there was no shame in losing at chess to an artificial intelligence. Even to an AI who specialized in piloting, not games of strategy. Even in losing over and over, more times than Lyle could remember.
Doubtless Corrigan remembered.
"Good game," Lyle said. The measure of his boredom was that he spoke aloud when neural interface would have been faster. One measure, in any event. Should anyone ever ask, he had spent the entire trip at two gees, without a break except the few minutes at turnover, for the miserable-duty pay.
Why did a roboship never break down within a billion klicks of civilization?
With a thought he pulled up virtual images from the ship's sensors. 2182 DV189 finally presented a recognizable, if battered, profile. On that Phobos-sized, stippled snowball, one speck was the autonomous mining ship he had been sent to repair. He was close enough, at last, to detect its low-power, self-contained, traffic-control transponder. The mining ship was otherwise unresponsive, whether queried, commanded, or sent a master reset.
Of course, a multibillion-sol ship going silent was why Lyle had been dispatched into the outer darkness aboard a very fast ship.
"How soon can you set us down?" he asked Corrigan.
"Forty minutes."
He'd wondered for days what could have gone wrong on the miner. Something unusual, for sure. Any AI had too many levels of redundancy, too many fail-safes and fallback modes, to have gone silent without warning. And yet this miner had. Rumor had it, others, too.
With nothing better to do, Lyle tried, once again, to make contact. Nada. For the hell of it, he cranked up the beam power from the comm laser. Still no response, but the vapors boiled off the snowball revealed water, oxygen, and lots of hydrocarbons. Even metals.
"I'll suit up," Lyle announced. Sooner started, sooner finished. And sooner on his way back to civilization. Or, though he hoped otherwise, dispatched on another service call. The Kuiper Belt was big, and no way, no how, could human crew accompany every ship.
"We have robots to make the initial survey."
Yes, they had. Perhaps he would even end up delegating the repairs to bots. But he would diagnose the problem faster, because the bots weren't all that bright. Had they been half as smart as Corrigan—
He wouldn't go near them, much less be alone with them. Who would?
AIs were colleagues, often friends. Certainly Corrigan was a friend, if not the sort of buddy with whom he could share a carouse.
So why not AI-smart robots?
Robots, somehow, were different. Because they would be... competitors? Possible successors? Maybe. That was only part of it. The reasoned part. The noncreepy part. He wasn't the type to imagine things going bump in the night—but neither did he want to create them. Give enough smarts to robots, and would they be so different from zombies and vampires?
If dreading smart robots made him irrational, so be it.
Lyle gestured vaguely, trying to encompass the claustrophobic bridge. The adjoining multipurpose "room," in which he slept, ate, exercised, and washed, was yet tinier. Betty was all legs. Apart from military couriers, he doubted any ship was faster or offered a greater cruising range. "I feel like a change of scenery."
In his mind's eye, Corrigan shrugged. Lyle took that as "okay." Or, maybe, as "wacky human."
On snowballs like the one Betty approached, one docked more so than one landed. He felt his ship shudder, just a bit, as Corrigan fired grapples. By then deceleration had ceased, and with it any semblance of gravity. He waited, already suited up, in the air lock.
As soon as Corrigan had winched them down to the snowball, almost before the AI could dispatch survey bots from a cargo hold, Lyle was through the outer hatch. The distant Sun, although merely a spark, outshone the full Moon seen from Earth. With a bit of amplification by his visor, he could see fine. But that spark, so near the horizon, would soon set. Hills and rubble piles cast long, inky shadows across the pockmarked landscape. Where the Sun managed to reach, the surface glinted: a brittle, frozen froth of ice mottled with tarry streamers. His HUD declared the surface temperature to be a balmy fifty. In degrees absolute.
Mining ship 129 stood, looming, perhaps a hundred meters distant, halfway to the freakishly close horizon. All struts and pipes and reagent tanks, MS129 was as much a factory/smeltery/refinery as a vessel. By comparison, his ship—no matter its thirty meters of fuel tank, reaction-mass tank, and mighty fusion drive—was a toy. Just a whole lot faster than the lumbering miner.
Dozens of robots, motionless, lay strewn across the landscape. That couldn't be good.
Whatever had happened here had happened fast. The first thing a mining ship did was construct tanks to receive what it extracted. He saw only two storage tanks, neither complete.
Lyle's own bots, spiderlike, scuttled toward the miner, rolling out and staking safety cable for him and deploying work lights. On his HUD, status indicators glowed green. He gave the bots a fifty-meter head start before following, hand over hand, his safety tethers clipped to the cable. One careless twitch here could set him adrift in space.
By the time he reached the mining vessel, bots had already begun to encircle it with more cable. Moving clockwise, he began a methodical survey. Calling where the main cable met the loop twelve o'clock, it was at four o'clock where he first spotted a problem.
A more-or-less oval region, about one meter by two, about six meters from the ground, looked... weird. Stuff had boiled/bubbled/spewed from MS129's hull to freeze into a formless glob. The gravity was too feeble and the temperature too cold for anything resembling icicles to have formed.
Per the schematics on his HUD, a primary computing node was just beneath.
A meteoroid strike? Something internal overloaded, shorted out, or otherwise overheating? Maybe. Didn't matter. A single comp node gone bad would not disable the ship. It had three more nodes just like this one.
"Ouch," Corrigan remarked. He was monitoring through Lyle's helmet camera and a radio link.
Lyle resumed his circuit around the inert vessel. At five o'clock on his imaginary clock face, he plunged into the mining ship's long shadow. Methodically he surveyed, as the bots aimed work lights wherever he looked. Nothing seemed amiss until, around ten o'-clock: a second melted-and-recongealed mass. A second main computing node.
Had a meteoroid struck one node, drilled through the ship, to exit through a second node? That wasn't impossible—just damned improbable. He was surprised at Corrigan's failure to comment.
"Are you seeing this?" Lyle netted.
A static hiss was the only answer. Interference from all the metal in the mining ship's hull? Perhaps. Even so, the link should have been relayed around the ship from bot to bot.
With a shrug and a yank on his
safety tether, Lyle resumed his survey.
Two comp nodes down, he mused, but the hull seemed otherwise intact. That should leave MS129 with a pair of functioning comp nodes. Unless those, too, had somehow—
Something jabbed Lyle in the back. Something hard. One of his damned robots?
On the emergency radio band, a synthed voice directed, "Do not move."
Chapter 2
Hunters: The intelligent species of the dim red-dwarf Barnard's Star system (see related entry). After the constellation—Ophiuchus, "The Serpent Holder"—in which Barnard's Star can (with a telescope) be seen from Earth, Hunters are commonly referred to as Snakes. In formal/diplomatic usage, for their native world of K'vith, they are known as K'vithians.
Hunters evolved from pack-hunting carnivores. Their early culture centered on clan structures, an apparent extension of preintelligence packs. From that genesis has developed an economic system of pure laissez-faire, caveat-emptor capitalism, centered on competing clan-based corporations. The dominant group dynamics are territoriality between clans—in modern times, the contested "territory" can be commercial rather than geographical in nature—and competition for status within and among clans. Usually of relevance only to the clans, these rivalries have sometimes impacted interstellar relations.
A Hunter enclave exists on the Uranian moon of Ariel, settled by survivors of an unsuccessful Sol system incursion (see related entries. "Himalia Incident" and "Arblen Ems settlement"). Following eighteen years of close United Planets supervision, Ariel Colony has been allowed to exercise broader (but still limited) self-rule.
—Internetopedia
The woman sat alone in the all but deserted cafeteria, picking indifferently at the tossed salad on her meal tray. At the soft zip-zip of shoes against grip strips, she glanced up. "Did I do something wrong?"
"No," Carl Rowland answered, arching an eyebrow. "Why would you ask that?"
"Because the warden made a beeline for me."
Beeline? Earther slang, he supposed. Warden, he understood. As someone had once noted, the most anxious man in a prison.
"UP liaison," Carl corrected. That was his job title, for the past couple of years, anyway, though the change fooled no one. If Ariel was no longer a POW camp, if its residents had been granted new privileges, neither was this the typical United Planets protectorate.
Nor would it ever be. Not on his watch.
The young woman still eyed him skeptically. Only she was no more young than he was middle-aged.
"Let's try this again." Carl offered his hand. "Carl Rowland. We don't see many new faces here." Not human faces, anyway. The Snakes bred like rabbits. That was another thing he worried about, no matter that the population barely topped twenty thousand. "I just stopped by to introduce myself and ask how civilization is faring."
"Grace DiMeara." She set down her fork to shake hands. Hardly anyone did that anymore. "Who says I'm from civilization?"
Truth was, he knew her name. Knew her flight plan, the ship's registration, and her passenger's stated business here. He knew that Grace was thirty-five, though something (her eyes? The massive, antique bracelet? The facial nanornaments so understated he barely saw them?) made her seem older. No ship got to land on this rock without a thorough review. Under his classified title, UPIA station chief, all that intel came through him.
"Simple process of elimination," he said. "You're not from around here."
She had a nice laugh. "If you're planning to chat me up, you may as well have a seat."
He sat. "So, routine flight?"
"That's how I like 'em." Grace reclaimed her fork and went back to pushing lettuce shreds around her bowl. "Anyway, as routine as it could be with the owner aboard."
"Corrine Elman. The worlds-famous reporter."
"That's her."
"Too bad. You had to keep everything shipshape."
"Mmm." Grace fixed her eyes on her salad. Not speaking ill of the boss.
He held in a grin. Grace wouldn't know it, but he and Corinne went way back. To call Corinne a slob would be too kind. But that was from another life, another era. When he had gone by a different name, had worn a different face.
The year he'd spent as Corinne's personal pilot had been among the happiest in his life.
Or, at least, that had been a simpler time. When, with the mob's bounty on his head, he'd only had to fear for himself. That and whether, between projects, Corinne would get bored enough to investigate him. She was scarily good at finding out stuff.
Then the Snakes showed up, aboard a stolen starship.
After swindling the UP, kidnapping humanity's leading scientists (and Corinne, in the wrong place at the wrong time), and shattering the entire freaking Jovian moon of Himalia to cover their tracks, the Snakes made a run for interstellar space. Leaving him, among others, to mount a desperate rescue mission. Successful, too: apart from destroying the only known starship.
In saving Corinne and the rest—and a bunch of Centaur prisoners: the ship's longhostage, rightful crew—he had caught the eye of some UPIA types. Who better to forever bury his past than the United Planet's premier spy agency? Where better to lie low than this godforsaken, ass-end-of-nowhere rock?
And so, here he was. The warden. And Corinne, his supposed friend, whom he had not seen in years, hadn't even bothered to message that she was coming.
"How long will you be on Ariel?" Carl asked.
Grace shrugged. "You'll have to ask the boss."
"You know? I might just do that."
Chapter 3
In a series of glides and hops, Corinne Elman followed her escorts. Only her hops, as often as not, bounced her off the corridor's low ceiling. Too many of her glides did their best to become pratfalls.
While her Snake escorts moved with an understated elegance.
When had she last been farther from Earth than the zenith of a suborbital jaunt? Too long, clearly. She had just begun to reacquire micro-gee skills—and to keep down food— when her ship had reached low-grav little Ariel. Whereupon she discovered new ways to flounder.
That she still owned a long-range interplanetary ship was fairly ridiculous, no matter that renting it out made it a decent investment. But to sell Odyssey would mean admitting she no longer expected to launch on short notice, unconstrained by commercial flight schedules, to chase a Big Story. That she had ceased to be a journalist.
So you are still a journalist? Then quit whining. Quit wallowing. Observe.
At least act like a journalist lest anyone wonder why you're here.
What did she see? A windowless corridor. Without retinal enhancements things would have seemed dim. Other than off Earth, the passageway could have been most anywhere.
Not so the Snakes, streaming both ways.
Snakes: Two arms, two legs, and a head. Upright posture. And there any resemblance to humans ended. Whippet-thin. Nostrils set flat in the plane of the face—and a third, upward-gazing eye set near the apex of the skull.
Hairless and iridescent-scaled. Glimpses of retractable talons in each fingertip (and, as they wore sandals, each toe). The tallest Snakes stood a quarter meter shorter than she—and she struggled to aspire to petite.
Not about you, Corinne chided herself.
Clumsily, she hopped/glided/careened after her minders.
Filter plugs irritated her nostrils without keeping out the smells of rotten eggs, freshly struck matches, and all manner of other sulfurous stinks. Collectively, bouquet de Snake. Aptly, fire and brimstone. Every whiff raised bad memories.
They traveled along a main "road." Lesser tunnels split off every few meters, marked by wall plaques labeled for life support, power generation, and other basic services. To her right, beyond an arc of clear wall, stretched a vast underground farm. To her left, a few meters later, a second plasteel wall looked over an ancient crater. In its hollow sprawled factories, pipelines, and a fusion reactor. Spacesuited workers teemed around a construction whose facade looked newly patched.
How many Snakes had she seen? Dozens, at least. Maybe hundreds. Adults and children. Workers. Families. The ones sporting nape-of-the-neck ridges were male. Clad, regardless of gender, in belted, one-piece jump-suits. A rainbow of colors and adornments denoted schools, civic groups, and utility workers.
But it was the uniforms of Snake officialdom that drew Corinne's eye, the black garb of the police that made her want to cringe. She had had too much experience with Snake warriors. In twenty years, she had not forgotten.
No matter how hard she tried.
A clumsy hop sent her tumbling. "Sorry," she said.
"Careful," said an escort. And he was the talkative member of the pair.
She had visited Ariel before. Visited the Foremost before. It wasn't much farther to the clan leader's office, she remembered, not needing to access the map upload in her implant.
And she had a job to do here, if not what the Foremost might imagine.
"Walt," Corinne netted. "I'm almost there."
In her mind's eye, seated behind a battered wooden desk, an avatar appeared. His suit, two centuries out of style, and the bristly mustache honored Walter Cronkite. The imaginary cigarettes he chain-smoked were an homage to Edward R. Murrow.
"I'm ready," Walt said.
Turning a corner, they came to a foyer offering human-and Snake-sized chairs.
"Here," an escort said. His eyes glazed, telltale of an implant-mediated infosphere consultation.
Wait here, she supposed that meant. Clanspeak implied verbs. Only the more fluid English speakers managed to use verbs appropriately. Glithwah would.
The escort reconnected with the physical world. "Arblen Ems Firh Glithwah, Foremost, in acknowledgment of your arrival."
Definitely, wait here.
Corinne decided: I don't think so.
I'm ready.
So, anyway, Glithwah supposed the message would indicate, in preemptory tone if perhaps not in precise wording. Her implant had shown only a sender ID. Glithwah dismissed the alert, the message unopened, focused on her labors. She didn't have to see this woman, even after agreeing to an interview, although to refuse now could raise suspicions.
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