by B. V. Larson
“Madison here,” she said.
“I hope you enjoyed that massive loss of intel, Madison,” I said. “You’ll be lucky if your career survives it.”
There was a period of silence.
“We’re just following orders, Riggs,” she said, “if this is Riggs. This is a restricted area. My rules of engagement—”
“Yes, all right. We complied with your demands. Now, will you escort us to the nearest Star Force base so I can be debriefed? We have valuable intel for Central Command.”
“All right. Keep your gun ports closed and stay on my fantail. Any hostile moves will be met in kind.”
“I need a few minutes to pick up survivors.”
“We’ll wait.”
The rest of our journey back to Earth was tense and unfriendly. Clearly, there wasn’t going to be a hero’s welcome for me—not for any of us.
When we’d almost reached the ring that led out of the Bellatrix system and back home to Venus, our spirits rose slightly. Here at last was a chance to glimpse home.
But it wasn’t to be. There was another ship waiting there for us, guarding the ring.
It was a large ship—a battleship of the Potemkin class.
“Identify that ship,” I ordered my bridge crew.
Everyone was sweating, shaking their heads. We were still following the three patrol boats. They were in tight formation, guiding us right toward the larger vessel which sat in the center of the ring like a spider sitting in a web.
“Captain Madison,” I called ship-to-ship, “why are we being greeted by a battleship? That’s not a standard patrol boat.”
“Stay on my fantail, Riggs. All will be clear shortly.”
I began to sweat. We were crawling closer and closer. I had a bad feeling about this.
“Dammit…” I said aloud. “If we had Valiant’s brain working, she could identify that ship. I’m sure of it.”
“I know what it is,” said a voice next to me.
I looked down. It was Marvin 2.0. He was holding up a new camera—who knew where he’d gotten it. Probably he’d stolen it and attached it to himself. Whatever the case, it looked like it was high quality and expensive.
“Tell me, Marvin.”
“In my infancy I was able to intercept transmissions, but I didn’t understand them all,” he began.
“In your infancy? You’re talking about yesterday, right?”
“Yes, exactly. At that stage, I was able to use the ansible in my internal structure to listen to transmissions, but I wasn’t yet able to interpret the data accurately.”
“Wait a second,” I said, “you were built with an ansible inside your brainbox?”
“I believe that’s already been made clear. Please pay closer attention.”
“Go on, Marvin. What did you overhear?”
“With added processing power and more time, I puzzled out the communications. Valiant transmitted a high-priority scrambled signal to this specific vessel. It’s called Vladivostok.”
“What’s its mission, Marvin?”
“Why, to oversee our destruction of course. I would have thought that to be self-evident. Ah, see there? They’re opening their gun ports. If I don’t miss my guess, we’re coming into optimal range at this very moment.”
“Shields up!” I shouted. “Gun ports open! CAG, dump those Daggers.”
“Should I sic them on the patrol boats, sir?” Bradley asked eagerly.
“Negative. Not unless they fire on us. Ignore them unless they engage.”
“Sir,” Adrienne said. “Captain Madison is attempting to contact us.”
“Tell her to stand down and stay out of this, or we’ll be forced to gut her ships, Star Force patrol or not.”
“Yes sir.”
It was on. I realized now that I should never have allowed them to destroy Stalker. They’d hurt me, and I’d let them do it while I remained passive.
But the only other option would have been to destroy Madison and her boats. I couldn’t do that. They’d been the first Star Force people I’d met in two years. To come home shooting—it just hadn’t been in me.
Now, however, I was in a fighting mood.
Madison called me back then. I saw her ships drift away, break formation and fall off behind us.
“Riggs,” she said, “I’m going to pretend I’m not in this. Sorry about your alien prize. These orders from Central…they’re bullshit if you ask me. You proved you were on the up-and-up when you stood down and abandoned Stalker. I’m not going to fire on you now.”
“Thanks Madison,” I said, “I owe you one.”
“Luck. Madison out.”
The channel closed, and the first big beam slashed out toward us less than a minute later. Such range, such power! The shot was a miss, but it didn’t leave us any doubt it had been meant in earnest.
I would have ordered Hansen to begin evasive action and countermeasures, but he was already standing the ship on its head and making me sick.
“Contact that ship!” I demanded. “Get Vladivostok’s captain on my screen.”
“Channel refused.”
“Keep trying. Marvin? Where did that robot go?”
Adrienne looked over her shoulder at me. “He scuttled off about a minute ago.”
I froze in thought. What would his big poppa robot have done?
“Get someone down to the life boats and capture my chicken robot,” I ordered. “I need him up here on the bridge.”
The next shot came in hot. It was another near-miss. We were dancing for all we were worth. Hansen was accelerating toward the ring and a possible escape. The battleship coiled in the center of it blocking our way, but I ordered our gunners to hold their fire.
Two security Raptors brought Marvin 2.0 back to the bridge at a run. Lifted in the air between the two marines, his stubby legs were churning. His single arm whipped around in alarm, and the camera on the end of it panned toward me.
“Captain Riggs,” he said. “These creatures have violated my person.”
“No, Marvin,” I said. “They’re following orders—my orders. I need you on the bridge to help me.”
“I would find it infinitely preferable—”
“I’m sure you would, but I need you to talk to that battleship out there. It’s not allowing me to open a channel. Use your ansible to hack into their com system and connect me with someone in charge.”
It was a tall order, especially for such a young robot. Valiant could have done it, but she was offline—permanently. The only operating ansible that could be used for a special job like this was inside Marvin’s metal skull.
“I doubt they possess an ansible,” Marvin began.
“Don’t even try that one,” I told him sternly. “You just got through telling me that you’d listened to an ansible transmission from Valiant to Vladivostok. I know they can hear you.”
“I wasn’t expecting to form such a specific memory in your organic brain with that comment,” he grumbled. “It was my impression you had only short-term mental capacities.”
Sighing, I had the Raptors set Marvin on his feet, and I knelt down to talk to him.
“Listen, Marvin,” I said. “Your life is on the line, here. That ship out there—”
“It seems premature, not to mention counterproductive, to utter threats now.”
“Threats? Oh, no. That’s not what I meant. I’m trying to tell you that battleship out there is taking shots at us. If it hits us with one, we’re all dead: humans, Elladans and robots together. You need to help us because—”
“The channel is open,” Marvin said suddenly.
“Thank you,” I said tightly. “Hello? Who am I talking to?”
“Lieutenant Stinson, orders processing. You need to get off this line. This is for classified traffic only.”
“Listen to me, Lieutenant. This is an emergency. I’m Cody Riggs, a Star Force officer, and I want to talk to your captain. I�
��m aboard Valiant, the ship you’re firing at. This is a misunderstanding.”
“I don’t know who you are, but—”
“Listen, Stinson,” I said. “There’s something wrong. An alien trick has gotten us to start firing at one another. Unless you want to be featured in a report that involves the destruction of Star Force vessels in a blue-on-blue fuck-up, I’d suggest you pass me up the chain of command.”
The line fell quiet, but it didn’t close. I was betting on the natural urge of any middleman to pass the buck. This time, it worked.
“Commander Mackle,” the next guy said.
Everyone was a stickler, but before we’d dodged two more salvos, one of which took some paint off my hull, I was talking to Vladivostok’s captain. His name was Brody.
“Captain Brody,” I said, “I don’t want to damage a Star Force battleship, but I’m going to have to if you keep blasting at me. We’re getting close to our optimal range.”
“They don’t teach us to respond to threats in the academy, Riggs,” he said. “Or whoever you are.”
“Brody, listen to me. Let’s stand down and talk a little. This is a misunderstanding. Let me have ten minutes, and if you’re still not convinced, I’ll surrender my ship to you without loss of life.”
He paused at this offer. “You’re on my kill-on-sight list, Riggs,” he said.
“All right,” I said, “I get that, but does that mean all my crew and passengers deserve to die as well?”
I had him there. If I was willing to surrender, there was no call to destroy my ship, orders or no.
“All right. Hit the brakes. We’ll talk.”
The channel closed. Hansen, who’d been listening in, shook his head at me.
“If we hold still, we’re toast,” he said.
“If he’s lying, we’re dead anyway. We’ve got no AI. We’re damaged and low on everything. That big ship only has to tag us once with her mains, and we’re gone.”
“I’ve got a plan, sir,” he said. “Just let me accelerate to maximum. With luck, we’ll do a high-speed fly-by and she’ll miss. On the far side—”
“On the far side is the thick atmosphere of Venus,” I told him. “Have you forgotten? That ring is on the planet’s surface, not up in orbit. You’re planning to fly us right into a brick wall.”
Hansen deflated after that. He was all out of bright ideas.
“All engines halt,” I ordered.
This time, everyone did as I’d asked. When we were drifting in space, I contacted Brody again.
“Can we talk now, Captain?” I asked.
“I’ve been working with my computer since we last spoke,” he said. “There was a disappearance two years ago—but it was far from here. Your voice prints seem to match, at least the prelim report says so… How the hell did you get into the Bellatrix system, Riggs?”
“It’s a long, long story, Captain Brody.”
“I’ve got time,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”
The next hour was spent explaining our story along with a transfer of a massive amount of supporting data files. Brody went over them, and the more he looked the more amazed he became.
-38-
Having secured an escort homeward, with Star Force troops aboard Valiant to show we were “under guard”, I felt better. I was fortunate in that Star Force captains had considerable latitude when following orders from Central. Due to the distances and Star Force tradition, a captain could amend his orders and apply good judgment. If he could justify his actions when he returned to base, he would get away with it, too.
But getting past the battleship wasn’t good enough. I still had plenty of problems. I wasn’t certain who’d ordered my arrest—or really, my death—but I had a pretty good idea who it was.
As best I could tell, my future father-in-law wanted me dead.
Grantham Turnbull and I had never gotten along from the start. As far as I could tell, he’d tried to kill me—probably to remove me from his daughter’s presence and to strike at the Riggs family. He had lofty political ambitions, and the Riggs family name might overshadow all that. After the assassination attempt failed, and Olivia had died instead of me, his dislike had grown steadily.
To me, all that was history now. It was time to focus on the present. I had problems. Someone, Turnbull or otherwise, was still offended by the idea that I was still around and still breathing. I’d managed to get the Star Force people on the spot to see reason, but that didn’t mean my enemies would stop trying to “fix” the problem I represented.
There were other problems, too. Adrienne was a big one. She’d begun to forgive me, gradually, for the incident with Cybele. Only the fact she knew Elladans could warp a man’s mind had saved me. We still weren’t sleeping together, but she would actually speak to me now and then. I’d decided to work on our relationship one careful step at a time.
But how could my slow climb out of the doghouse continue? I knew that I was going to have to fly home and publicly accuse her father of killing her sister and trying repeatedly to kill me. That wasn’t going to make Adrienne happy. I didn’t see how our relationship could survive it.
My sole confidant in all this was Marvin. He knew the story—probably more than he was letting on. I’d thought at first that his memory had been erased. That was sad as he really couldn’t be the same Marvin with a full reboot.
But computers aren’t quite like humans. Their artificial minds could survive death.
“Marvin?” I asked when I caught him in Valiant’s data core, messing with the various brainboxes. “You do know you’re not supposed to be in here, right?”
He twisted a camera arm around to look at me. He had two of them now, and they were making his central brainbox teeter unevenly when he walked.
“This chamber is clearly marked restricted to official personnel only,” he said. “I’m a walking brainbox. In my opinion, you’re the one who should be expelled.”
The new Marvin wasn’t quite like the old one, I’d noted over the last two days. He seemed child-like and a little more prissy. Maybe the original Marvin had been like that initially—I didn’t know.
He went back to the dead stack of brainboxes that lined the room like bricks. He tapped into one at the top of the stack and activated it for data perusal with his longest central tentacle.
“All right,” I told him, stepping close and squatting behind him, “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m going to have to take you out of here.”
That got his attention. The two cameras drifted back to gaze at me. “Why?”
“Because you’re not authorized—”
“I thought that issue was settled.”
I heaved a sigh. “Marvin, listen, you have to learn about the chain of command on this ship. I’m at the top aboard Valiant at the moment. You’re pretty close to the bottom. Do you understand this?”
“Why?” he asked.
“Why what?”
“Why do you get to tell me what to do?”
“Because you’re a very young brainbox. You’re like a child left behind by an old friend.”
“When I get older, will these restrictions be lifted?”
“Probably, yes,” I said. “You must prove your good intentions and that you know how to—”
“I find these interruptions and restrictions frustrating,” he said. “Why can’t I prove my competence to you now?”
“It’s not like I’m asking you to pass a test. You have to prove yourself through prolonged good behavior.”
Marvin retracted his tentacle and sat down on the floor. He was pretty much a box then, except for his cameras, which watched me closely.
“If I squat here motionless for a week, would that be convincing enough?” he asked.
“That’s not quite what I had in mind,” I said, amused. “What are you doing in here, anyway?”
“Accessing memories. Recordings of activities. My progenitor’s mind is parti
ally stored here through association.”
“You aren’t powering up Valiant again, are you?”
“No,” he said. “To do so would slow down the process. I’m gleaning the ship’s data without activating its processor other than as a search mechanism.”
I nodded. “That’s not as bad as I thought.”
Sakura showed up then. She stood in the open hatchway, looking annoyed. She put her fists on her hips and glared.
“I can’t think of two individuals I’d less like to see in the data core.”
“Let me remind you that your actions are still under investigation, Chief,” I told her.
She gave me a little smile. “As are yours, sir. We’ll see what a Star Force tribunal has to say.”
“Yes, we will. If you don’t want to spend the rest of this journey home in the brig, I suggest you return to your duties. You’re no longer allowed in the data core.”
Huffing, she left. Marvin watched her go curiously.
“Is that female one of your sexual conquests?” he asked me.
“What? No. How did you get that idea?”
“She seems irritated. All the women you’ve had relations with are currently irritated with you. I logically—”
“No, Marvin. We’ve never even kissed. Now, let’s talk about your goals here. I’m willing to let you play around in the data core perusing the ship’s memories.”
“An excellent decision. May I ask how I proved my reliability to you? I must have missed the critical point of transition.”
“Uh…you didn’t, really. This is a chance to do so, however. I changed my mind because I need you to look for certain details—”
“Ah, I see,” he said. “My utility allowed me to supersede the normal restrictions. Pattern learned.”
I blinked for a moment. I was pretty sure I’d just taught Marvin a bad thing, but I didn’t know how to correct that—even if it was possible.
“Never mind about that,” I said. “Here’s what I want you to do in order to continue working in here. Look for all data concerning orders from Central about me. These orders will be restricted and possibly difficult to access. When you’re finished examining any correlations between myself, Sakura, Valiant and especially Grantham Turnbull, report back to me.”
