by Mel Keegan
“It is making sounds, General,” Lai’a said musingly. “They are under the range your suit audio can detect, but the gundrones are recording.”
“Sounds? What kind of sounds?” Mark asked eagerly. “Something we could hope to mimic?”
“With Resalq or human vocal apparatus – no,” Lai’a said at once. “However, the audible sounds superficially resemble those created by various amphibians. Here is a sample.”
Over the open loop, Marin listened to a stream of gurgling, whopping, rumbling and croaking. Travers swore softly, and Shapiro groaned. “I deserve this. For months, I’ve been preparing rational arguments to be delivered in inspiring language, imagining myself looking the enemy in the face, pleading the innocence and indignation of both our species.”
“Language, Lai’a?” Mark might not have been aware of a syllable Shapiro had said. “Is it speaking?”
“Definitely,” Lai’a assured him. “And I am recording. I will need comprehensive samples, plus some point of reference. Without that point of reference, the spoken language will remain identifiable as a language, but impossible to translate.”
“And they,” Travers added, “are going to have to provide the reference points.”
“They’ll have to want to talk,” Vidal warned. “If they don’t want to –”
As he spoke, the creature shot a dense cloud of black ink, spun and jetted away with a venting of compressed gas from the shell. It vanished into the darkness of the chamber, leaving just a fog of ink and a trail of bubbles, which in moments dissolved into the mineral-heavy water.
“The ink cloud is a neurotoxin,” Lai’a reported, “similar to venom delivered by the fangs you saw in two of its six ‘arms.’ These characteristics identify these creatures as hunters; their agility, speed, buoyancy and venom render them among the biosphere’s most potent hunters. Analysis of the neurotoxin suggests one of these creatures could disable or kill a prey animal one hundred times its size. Closeup imaging of the four paddle-like members set around the feeding pouch shows three ranks of oscillating flat blades on the edges of each paddle. The feeding method is simple. The creature seizes disabled prey with two of the members while the remaining two carve into the flesh and pass wedges direct to the feeding pouch, which may be mouth or gut, or a combination of both. Further data is required to differentiate.” Lai’a paused for a moment, and its tone was terse. “More Zunshu are in the dim compartment. The gundrones detect at least twenty, clustered together in the darkness. They appear to be hiding.”
“Any trace of weapons back there?” Travers wondered.
“No. The creatures appear to be extremely timid.” Lai’a paused. “The chamber into which they retreated has two ‘doors.’ They can escape at whim. However, they are hiding in the shadows.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Marin said softly. “They can see we’re in armor, bristling with weapons. They have to know instruments can look into darkness – shadows are no defense.”
“Yet they remain clustered in the dimness,” Lai’a told him.
“As if they think we can’t see them.” Vidal turned to look back the way they had come. “Are these retards? They were left behind – because they’re morons, it wasn’t worth the bother of rounding them up?”
“Or …” Mark hesitated. “They could be captives. Slave laborers, stolen from another community?” He made exasperated sounds. “These might not be Zunshu at all. A captive race?”
“How about a sub-species of Zunshu, considered inferior and expendable,” Dario suggested.
“These could be low-caste Zunshu,” Jazinsky added. “The high-caste and smart ones picked up and ran when they saw us coming. These guys are subordinate, the ones who draw the filthy jobs, clean the latrines, and are denied education. They might also be in-bred to produce timidity, subservience, even stupidity.”
“A docile, expendable labor caste.” Travers sounded disgusted. “It figures. But unless I miss my guess, it also means they’re sure to have a warrior caste at the other end of the social ladder.”
“Very likely,” Mark said with grim conviction, “and also a caste of academics. Given this system, one might expect to find a priesthood of some description, even if they don’t recognize deity.”
“Hustle – again,” Vidal said sharply. “We’re not going to get answers by shining flashlights down rabbit holes. You want to task a drone to image the whole bunch? Make it quick.”
“It’s the computer core we need,” Dario agreed. “The answers are about 120 meters ahead of us!”
“Lai’a, send one gundrone five meters into the chamber,” Mark said quietly. “Get all the images and video possible. Don’t try to trap them. If they flee, let them run. As for us … as the man said, hustle!”
A ‘door’ – or window, or hatch, Marin was unsure – was fifteen meters up on their left. They rose into it on repulsion, following three gundrones with two behind, while one lingered on the edge of the dimness where the group of creatures seemed to believe they were unseen, safe. The passage rose on an angle, twisted through a corkscrew and inclined down again, through more than a hundred meters of shining mother-of-pearl and wriggling colonies of bioluminescent crustacea.
The drones dropped out first into an almost spherical bubble where the light came from everywhere and no direction seemed to be ‘up.’ A moment of disorientation caught Marin by surprise before be resorted to instrumentation. He and Travers stood back now, and Curtis found himself consciously setting a perimeter, walking it, while Mark, Dario and even Midani Kulich began to croon over the contents of a bubble-within-a-bubble. Within the transparent-shelled capsule was a six meter by three meter case, almost like a missile housing, save that it was tapered and convoluted, the surface striated with gorgeous, feathery veins.
“It’s a carbon monoxide environment inside,” Dario was muttering as they took readings.
“Circuitry … holographic, crystalline matrix.” Mark was breathless, as if with excitement. “This is it, Lai’a, you picked it right.” He aimed every sensor he possessed into the bubble, which exuded a soft, pearly illumination.
Marin shifted to see around them, and frowned over what he saw within. The object itself was as alien as everything in this place, but his helmet display repeated the deep scan Mark was running, and as he glimpsed the inside of the object he murmured a soft oath. “Now, that’s – familiar.” He heard the edge in his own voice.
“It ought to be,” Jazinsky snorted. “Right inside the casing it’s like any Zunshu probe or thing we ever salvaged back in the Deep Sky. Congratulations, folks. We just hit the mother lode.”
“But it’s … dead.” Dario was taking readings off the apparatus itself now. “Mark, you remember the live probe we caught one time. We spent years negotiating with it, getting inside its mind, before it melted itself down to keep its secrets.”
“As if I’m likely to forget.” Mark was adjusting his sensors. “I always believed I’d glimpsed into the Zunshu mind itself. Any AI can only ever be a mirror image of its creator. I caught one glimpse into the Zunshu mind, and it was … cool, rational, multi-dimensional – alien. I thought it was beautiful.”
“Like this place.” Marin physically shivered. “It is beautiful, and cool – but the way it’s made is like those puzzles. You know the ones, Neil, with the stairways to nowhere and the doorways leading right back to where you just came from.”
“I know them,” Travers growled. “Lai’a, anything moving?”
“Nothing, Colonel Travers.” Lai’a paused. “There is no movement within a kilometer of your position in any direction, save for the tiny schooling creatures, the grazing livestock, and approximately 300 of the large forms identified as some captive species, or low caste of Zunshu. And they,” it added, “appear to be cowering. Some have taken to the passages we assumed were technical access ways, and have frozen in locations where their shells make them virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding surfaces. Recent observations show t
hey have the ability to drop their body temperature to ambience with their surroundings.”
Marin’s nerves gave a prickling start. “You mean, they could be all around us and we don’t see them, can’t detect them?”
“Yes.” Lai’a paused. “Be on your guard.”
“I thought,” Vidal snapped, “you said you detected no weapons.”
“And I do not,” Lai’a said imperturbably, “but you have entered an area rich in apparatus. Machinery,” it added pointedly, “can be configured to explode, implode, short-circuit and emit acids or corrosives. Ostensibly harmless apparatus has a high potential for weaponization.”
“Shit – it’s right,” Vidal muttered. “I’m getting slow. Anything on deep scan from the outer system, Lai’a?”
“Nothing, Colonel,” it assured him. “The transspace drive is secure. Your way back to the boarding tube is open. Captain Vaurien is technically deceased at this point, while nano repair an aneurism in the left frontal lobe of his brain. Body temperature has been lowered to 32oC; cardiac restart in just over two minutes.”
“Sweet Christ,” Jazinsky breathed, “I wish I believed in something to pray to.”
“What is this thing, this Swee’cryzed?” Midani Kulich wondered, preoccupied as he summoned the nearest drone and popped open its service hatch. Inside was the full toolkit required for maintaining the mechanism.
“Ask me later,” Jazinsky muttered, “I’ll tell you what my ancestors believed.”
“Hemshenor,” Midani guessed. “How you are saying it, Mark?”
“You say deity,” Mark told him.
“Deetee.” Midani was sorting tools, talking absenting. “I saying … I say. Deetee.”
“Day-itty,” Dario reiterated, enunciating sharply. “Like our own ancestors. Remember your history class. The statues and paintings from On’luve.”
“Daytee… ah! Here, being like this, getting goodly, right-tool-for-a-job!” Midani brandished a slim blue case.
He and the Sherratts seemed to know what they were doing, and they were so busy, they had lost any perception of time. Marin was edgy, anxious, stalking the perimeter set by the gundrones for the sake of doing something while the Resalq seemed to fiddle with tools he recognized and procedures he did not.
“Hey, Curtis – relax,” Travers said quietly. “I’m supposed to be the one climbing the walls.”
“I’m not climbing any wall,” Marin informed him. “But every Dendra Shemiji nerve in my entire body is telling me to either vanish or find a defensible position, and we can’t do either.”
It was Shapiro who said, “This is their computer core. I’d say this is a pretty defensible position. They’re not likely to shoot or launch missiles with their AI core right behind us.”
“Unless it’s expendable,” Vidal mused. “It’s small, Harrison … I’m thinking, this might be a node. There could be scores, hundreds, just like it across the platform. In which case they can lose one node and not even notice it was gone.”
“It doesn’t have to be large, Mick,” Dario said over his shoulder as they worked. “All the Zunshu tech we ever researched was comparatively tiny. They can put a sophisticated AI into a bloody thimble. Don’t let the apparent size of the thing fool you. In Zunshu terms, it’s humungous. It’s a monster.”
“Big enough to run this whole structure?” Vidal hazarded.
“And the planet, and the whole star system, and their war.” Mark did not look up from the work. “Hush now, this is delicate.”
“You’ve, uh, done this stuff before, haven’t you?” Vidal whispered.
“Many times,” Dario crooned. “The only thing different here is, we’re in an aqueous environment, and on the other side of this silicon-dioxide membrane is a dry chamber pressurized with carbon monoxide, enveloping a mechanism which may not take kindly to being hosed down with water that’s heavy with every mineral you can think of. Now, shush.”
They had attached a vacuum-sealed maintenance capsule to the membrane and pumped it out. The seal was secure and, inside, a hair-fine beam was separating glass crystals at the molecular fracture lines. The diameter of the capsule was wide enough to permit a gauntleted hand to pass through, and its center was a smart valve. The nearest point on the six-meter case of the AI core was well within reach. As Dario and Midani obsessed over the vacuum seal, Mark was already configuring a finger-thick conduit. A cable passed through it; on one end, an eight-point plug already socketed into the nearest gundrone, on the other end, a wad of smart-gel in a dry pack. The nano were configured to extrude into any socket, on contact.
Marin might have fretted about compatibilities in current and baud rate, but Lai’a had already deep scanned the AI. It was enormously sophisticated, but mechanically identical to the AI at the heart of the Kjorin stasis chamber.
“Hold on,” Dario whispered, “one more second … one more second … got it! We’re through. Lai’a – is the thing awake? Does it know we’re in?”
“No response, Doctor,” Lai’a told him. “It appears you are correct. The machine has malfunctioned. This,” it said baldly, “is almost certainly the reason I have suffered no attempt to override my processes. Any such assault could only have issued from an AI of comparable or greater sophistication than myself; and it is defective.”
“Which suits us,” Mark decided. “Have you scanned it sufficiently to run any diagnostic?”
“Superficial diagnostics only,” it warned. “The mechanism appears to be extremely old, and has not been maintained in an appropriate manner. Power cells have exceeded their potential to accept or retain energy levels sufficient to power the core. The AI is compensating by allowing power to accumulate for up to an hour, and then coming online for periods measuring in one or two seconds. These bursts of activity are sufficient for it to monitor and regulate machinery operating across this structure.”
For a moment Mark hesitated in the act of feeding the cable through the valve. “Then, it could be aware of you, Lai’a, and us.”
“It probably is,” Lai’a said calmly. “However, its resources are too meager for it to harass me. It could easily deploy automata to harass your party, Doctor Sherratt. The fact it has not done so indicates that no such automata exist.”
“Which is weird enough to make your blood run cold,” Vidal growled. “Get on with it, Mark. I’m starting to look for shadows to jump at. Make it quick.”
“Quick,” Mark warned, “is a relative term. We’ll be transferring data as fast as the gundrone’s command channel permits, and I’d like to empty out the database. It could be a download of stunning proportions.”
“You’re in luck,” Travers told him with grim satisfaction. “Modern gundrones are smarter and faster than they’ve ever been. The reason they’re so smart is, they deploy with only default behaviors. Their brains stay home on the gunship. Everything they see is uploaded for analysis. Their commands squirt in micro-second pulses through the J-layer, tickling e-space – way beyond comm jamming. These guys hose data.”
“All right, then.” Dario’s tone was dark, rich. “Let’s get some power to this puppy … not enough to wake the AI, just enough to make basic functions accessible. Lai’a, you want us to poke around in there…?”
“No, Doctor.” A thread of eagerness sharpened the AI’s normally serene voice. “I will be infinitely more swift. I know the structure and language of the Kjorin stasis chamber’s core controller. From preliminary deep scan results, this machine is merely a more sophisticated version of the same technology.”
“Equal to yourself?” Mark asked as Dario and Midani teased a power line out of the gundrone.
The smart-gel connector at the nose of the cable fed through the valve, and Dario muttered, “Gimme a steer here, Lai’a. Damned if I can see any power coupler. Where does it want to be fed?”
“Pass control of the cable to me, Doctor,” Lai’a offered. “Its sockets are on the opposite side of the case from your position. Also, the whole casing is extrem
ely old and delicate; all power and data sockets are atrophied, despite the carbon monoxide environment.”
Travers was intent on the smart-cable, which coiled and reared like a snake with its own micro servos embedded in the jacket. It might have been alive. “Why carbon monoxide?”
“Less oxygen – less oxidization,” Dario reasoned, “it’s dead easy to make, and to pressurize ... here we go.”
A flicker of power had appeared in the ancient machine, just enough for Marin’s sensors to detect a faint trace of warmth, a hum of old, old crystal-matrix holographic circuits flickering to life on a level far too low to permit the AI to wake.
“Lai’a, will the power cells absorb this current?” Dario asked.
“No,” Lai’a assured him. “They are deteriorated past the point of storage potential. Power is adequate only for our purposes. Please extrude the data conduit.” And then, without any pause or change in tone, “Captain Vaurien’s brain chemistry has been rebalanced; hepatic and renal function are normalizing. Pulmonary function is compromised by massive edema. Doctor Grant is configuring nano therapy to correct this; the cryogen tank remains on standby.”
As it finished speaking the wad of smart-gel oozed into place on, around, inside, the data socket, and Dario stood back. “That’s it, Lai’a. That’s all we can do. Good enough?”
The gundrone’s control panel had lit up at once as Lai’a began to use it as a military-grade router. Marin’s instruments registered a thermal bloom in the drone, a shriek of comm activity, before Lai’a said, “Quite adequate, Doctor Sherratt. I have access to the computer core. The AI remains dormant. I am temporarily disengaging its higher functions.”
“Temporarily?” Vidal echoed.
“You mean, why not just shut it down?” Shapiro asked. “Because when we leave it still has a job to do, in one-second bursts of life. It keeps this structure in trim –”
“While nobody here seems to know enough to service it,” Jazinsky added, “even to the tune of changing its power cells once every few centuries!” She made sounds of frustration. “A dead AI at the heart of a city-sized installation filled with creatures who only know how to run away and hide. And we’re sure, positive, these creatures are the Zunshu?”
