Alien: The Cold Forge

by Alex White

  “Commander. Anne.” Dorian shakes both of their hands in turn.

  “Director,” Anne begins. “My records may be out of date… Have you received all of the required safety training? Hazmat certs? Materials safety? Escape vehicle orientation and codes?”

  I have my own goddamned spaceship, woman. Nothing annoys Dorian more than all of the pointless presentations he has to endure at each new installation. Hours and hours of time thrown away, just so he can memorize some codes he’ll never use. “Absolutely,” he says. “I’m not sure why the records didn’t come across.”

  Anne nods, but doesn’t press the issue. She knows he’s too important for such garbage.

  “You’re familiar with the purpose of this station?” Cardozo asks.

  “I’ve only read a few of the reports. Carter Burke wanted to start a special project, but the Governance Board weren’t confident in his ability to see it all the way through. Something about it being too much for a junior executive.” He’d read between the lines. “This, then, is a backup to his project?”

  “Yes,” Daniel says. “I’ve heard he’s pretty far along. Do you know if he’s gotten any results?”

  “No clue,” Dorian says. “Different department.”

  Cardozo gestures toward three personnel, two men and a woman. “These are our project leads, Blue Marsalis, Josep Janos, and Lucy Biltmore.”

  Judging from his appearance, Janos works out, and Dorian takes his hand first, shaking firmly, puffing out his chest a bit without making it too obvious. The man has a broom of a mustache, and his clothes are clearly well loved, fraying in places. This will be Dorian’s morning workout partner. Perhaps Anne can join them.

  Biltmore comes next, shy and uninteresting. Lucy has the sort of homegrown look that Dorian can’t stand, and he inwardly hopes she’ll need to be shuffled off the station. She looks like a child jammed into an adult-sized flight suit. He gives her a hearty greeting and moves on as soon as is socially acceptable.

  When he reaches Marsalis, he stops dead. Wavy blond hair, artificially attractive features. He knows a synthetic when he sees one.

  “Aren’t you a Marcus?” he asks.

  The Marcus’s mouth twitches with a socially required smile. This question has produced a fascinating irritation in the synthetic, which Dorian has never experienced. He reminds himself to keep up his friendly, almost boisterous manner with a hearty handshake.

  “I get that a lot,” Marsalis says, thin-lipped, taking back his hand. “I’m a human, piloting a synthetic. My real body is in my quarters.”

  “That’s incredible.” Dorian circles the Marcus, looking him up and down with a grin, while the android remains unmoving. “Well, Blue, I’m Director Sudler.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mister Sudler.”

  So Blue Marsalis will be the piece that doesn’t fit into Dorian’s machine. “Please, call me Director, at least until we know each other a little better.” He quirks his lips.

  Marsalis chuckles and looks at Cardozo with a sarcasm Dorian has never seen on a synthetic face.

  “I didn’t know ‘Director’ was an honorific on Earth nowadays,” Marsalis says, crossing his arms. “You know… Mister, Missus, Mix, Doctor… Director.”

  Dorian glances about, taking in the reactions of the crew. They’re afraid of an auditor, but they’re enjoying Marsalis’s commentary. Maybe he can make her appear rude. He shakes his head, frowning.

  “I’m surprised that bothers you, Mister Marsalis. Or is it Miss Marsalis? Or should I call you Blue?”

  “I’m sorry,” Marsalis says, offering his hand once more. “You can call me Doctor Marsalis… at least until we know each other a little better.”

  Dorian laughs to cover his annoyance. Marsalis’s denigration and blatant disregard for the authority of an auditor is like a needle pressing against soft tissue under his fingernail. If he fires Blue, however, it’ll have to be for more than simple revenge, or he’ll appear weak.

  But he will fire Blue.

  “I’m sure you’d like to see your quarters, Director Sudler,” Cardozo says. “Perhaps you could get settled in and then—”

  “Nonsense, Daniel,” Dorian says. “Let’s dig in. I’ve been sleeping too long already. Show me your projects.”

  “Then allow me to show you our operation,” Cardozo says, then he speaks to no one in particular. “Navigation, take us to the central SCIF.” A short chime fills the corridor. The lights along the floor change direction, running away in a blue stream. Dorian cranes his neck to follow their new pathway.

  “That’ll help you get around while you’re down here, especially in the SCIF,” Cardozo says. “You wouldn’t believe how twisty it can be. Some of these modules were designed for prisoners.”

  “Cute,” Dorian says. “And do you have any prisoners?”

  Cardozo gives him a wry smile. “Yes, we do. Let’s go say hello, then.”

  * * *

  It strikes Dorian as overkill. The idea of a sensitive, compartmented information facility on a secret space station ten parsecs from Earth. What can they have to hide that isn’t already shrouded by the radiation of Kaufmann?

  The central strut of the station stretches at least a half of a mile, with sockets for additional prefab modules along the way. It has a pleasing repetition to it, and looking out the windows to his left, Dorian can see the heat shield protecting them from the rays of the dwarf star below. The plates are articulated—was the station designed to be moved? RB-232 was clearly created to be expanded, and yet it sits mostly empty, save for the two ends. It’s a waste. The station should be bustling with employees and additional crew quarter modules.

  Yet that’s not his focus. Auditors get little benefit from identifying lost opportunities. Those could be costly, and his job is to cut expenses.

  “Why do you call it the Cold Forge?” Dorian asks, walking alongside the three project managers and a few of their personnel. Ken, Susan, and Montrell accompany them.

  “Because this entire station is dedicated to the manufacture of adaptive weapons, biological, artificial intelligence and software,” Anne replies, her matter-of- fact voice carrying through the cavernous central strut. “Kind of like the forges of old, where they used to make swords. Except we don’t make ships, missiles, or pulse rifles here. We win wars.”

  “I see.” Dorian gives her a boyish grin, presenting himself to her as charmed because he doubts she has ever charmed anyone.

  “You can see from our superstructure that we have the SCIF on one side and crew quarters on the other,” Anne says. “The SCIF is vibration-isolated with full air gaps to all of the networks. No data in, no data out without clearing our official channels. That means we can fully lock it down during resupply missions.”

  They pass a glass door, and Dorian peers inside to see the blinking lights of server racks. In the center of the round chamber, a console awaits, its screen dim.

  “That’s Titus,” Cardozo says. “He’ll be assisting you during your audit with your classified, non-project data. Have you read the classification guides for RB-232?”

  “Yes, Commander,” Dorian says, and the man preens slightly. It’s been a while since someone called him by rank alone. “But I’ll need to run numbers on all three projects here, and I’ll want some specifics.”

  “I’m not sure you’ll be able to see all of my project,” Marsalis says, his (her?) eyes cast absentmindedly to the ceiling as though counting crossbars. “I’m sure you’ll understand. There are several dimensions that aren’t available to the operating unit heads, so a regular director—”

  Dorian stops and narrows his eyes. “I think you’ll find that I’m not a ‘regular’ director, Doctor Marsalis. I’m here on the full faith and credit of the senior vice president, and while on site I’m cleared at all levels of classification, with all code words.” He looks down his nose. “But while we’re on the subject, how… exactly… do you enter the SCIF to work on your project?”

  “I don�
�t follow,” Marsalis says.

  He strides up to the doctor, his long bird legs closing the distance in just two steps, and then waves his hand over the synthetic’s head, and the doctor recoils.

  “There are no strings on this puppet,” Dorian says. “You’re a walking, wireless transmitter.” He turns to Anne and grins as though they’re sharing a joke, though deep down, Dorian doesn’t find it amusing. He already sees the biggest budgetary abuse on RB-232. “So why did we build a multi-billion-dollar SCIF if we’re going to put a radio inside of it?”

  “My comms are secured,” Marsalis says, “and I was given special dispensation by Elise Coto.”

  “Coto is our VP of Genetic Interests, and she insisted Blue have an assignment here, in spite of her… difficulties,” Anne adds with a small defensive note. “Doctor Marsalis is a leading researcher in her field.”

  Dorian’s ears prick up. Behind the perfect synth face of a man, Blue is a woman. A thrill tugs at his heart. He’s never met anyone like this doctor. Cardozo is an old jarhead. Anne is a wannabe jarhead. Lucy is a joke. Janos is a geek… but Blue Marsalis is someone new. What does it do to a person to live through a synthetic? When she imagines a mirror, does she imagine Marcus, or her own face? Is she gnarled by illness? He wants to needle her more to see what color blood comes out.

  “Then I guess we’ll get to see something amazing, since we’ve made a special exception for you,” Dorian says.

  “Yes, you will,” Cardozo says. “But your crew will have to learn to love the quarters. I didn’t get authorization for them, so they’ll be staying put.” He looks meaningfully at the trio from the Athenian. “This stuff is all ‘need-to-know.’”

  Dorian nods to Ken, who gleefully retreats. The rest follow. Ken doesn’t care for this business crap, anyway, and he doesn’t even bother to hide it. Dorian has never considered what they do with their copious free time— they can stare at the wall for all he cares. He only ever needs them when he has to be transported, or wants corporate reinforcement.

  The crew of the Athenian disappears into the bowels of the station, and Cardozo gestures for some of his own crew to follow, instructing them to show the visitors around.

  At the end of the central axis they pass into chain-link caged walls, and the passageway begins a steady incline, ending with a bulkhead door secured with multifactor security: biometric, code, and key. Yellow caution stripes surround the doorframe, and a set of surveillance cameras records them from every possible angle. When Dorian looks back at the corridor beyond the chain-link, he finds glittering black USCM autoturrets trained on his position.

  “What are those for?” he asks, nodding to the guns. “Intruders on the station?”

  “We call this area the ‘killbox,’” Anne says. “Two hundred feet of constricted corridor with radio-transparent chain walls. There’s an emergency seal behind us. Anything tries to get out of here, we open fire with caseless ten- twenty-fours.”

  “‘Get out of here?’” Dorian repeats. “So what, are we going to wear IFF tags?”

  “No,” Blue says. “Those guns are designed not to care if you’re friend or foe. If you’re in the killbox and they come on, you’re dead. We can’t risk anyone bringing something out of the labs.”

  Cardozo turns around, hands clasped behind his back. “Director Sudler, everything you’re about to see remains classified under TS/SCI Mountain protocols. You will not be exporting reports from this station without clearing them through myself and Anne as export control. You will not speak of this to anyone else, including those who possess Weyland-Yutani TS/SCI clearances. The penalty for such an action would be breach of paragraph six, subsection B of your employment contract, and would subject you and your estate to both civil and criminal action. Do I make myself clear?”

  “That’s the same deal I face on every station, Commander,” Dorian says. “I think I can handle it.”

  Daniel gives him a wide grin. “Going to be tougher when you see what we’ve got inside. Let’s open her up, Wexler.”

  Anne and Daniel enter codes, scan hand and face geometry, and insert a pair of keys, turning them at the same time. With a hiss, the SCIF door slides into its pocket. Daniel beckons them in, and as they step over the threshold, Dorian sees that the bulkhead is nearly a half- yard thick. There can be no breaking it, no ramming it.

  The SCIF common area stretches before them, an open structure three stories tall with a glass-enclosed control room at the top. Anne ushers Dorian inside, and the rest of the Cold Forge crew follows.

  “The SCIF is one hundred thirty thousand square feet of specialized laboratories, servers, and workstations. It’s designed for scientists to work in concert, and all our personnel float between projects. Don’t let its compact size fool you—there are a half-mile of corridors connecting a hundred tiny rooms in here.”

  “Impressive,” Dorian says. “Looks like your security folks have your work cut out for you. What’s that up there?” He points to the glass control room.

  “That’s our interface to the AI mainframe, Juno,” Daniel says. “She’ll be assisting you from inside the SCIF. Any SCI queries that you have go through her. Remember, Titus is for ‘total station control.’ Juno is for ‘just the classified stuff.’”

  Dorian gives him a crass smirk. “You can’t be serious.”

  Cardozo shrugs. “Stupid enough to remember the difference, right?”

  They first take him to “Rose Eagle”—some kind of reactor and focusing array, spearheaded by Josep Janos. They explain that it’s a way of disrupting entangled communications networks and injecting information into them. At that, Dorian spaces out. Janos has a way of speaking that makes his technical explanations unbearable, ending every sentence as though it is a question. Every time his voice rises, so do Dorian’s hackles.

  But Dorian already knows that Rose Eagle doesn’t matter. It’s on schedule, to be delivered to a bunker in West Virginia during the next crew rotation. Janos is returning home when that occurs, to take R&R for a year and hike the Appalachian Trail. He has no vulnerabilities to exploit, and so Dorian loses all interest. There’s nothing more boring than a project running according to plan.

  Next is “Silversmile,” a neural network virus which began its life as two words. Unlike Rose Eagle and Glitter Edifice, its randomly selected pair of words sounds ominous, like a brand name. Using the printers, Lucy Biltmore has made herself a mission patch and logo which she shares with her laboratory assistants. She’s used her custom wordmark throughout the operating system.

  There’s an irony in the nomenclature of the digraph— Weyland-Yutani’s classification authority selects monikers designed to discourage mental associations, but Lucy has embraced them. If she deployed weaponized code at this moment, adversaries would have little trouble tracing the project back to RB-232. Dorian watches the skinny woman with her cartoonishly large eyes and mouth, her messy pixie cut, and he looks forward to reprimanding her for this blatant oversight.

  Anticipating Dorian’s arrival, Lucy has prepared a show and tell with large, attractive readouts and graphs. There are many bullet points. She produced a video with motion graphics depicting the effects of Silversmile on a computer network. The method is simple. Silversmile uses whatever comms it can find to infect other machines, then it lashes together a distributed processing system. The more computers it can infect, the smarter it becomes. Once it feels confident, it intuits the most critical infrastructure and attacks it first. Perhaps a dam turbine, perhaps a life support system.

  “But we’re writing it to be restricted to a single location, because, you know…” Lucy trails off as ANY QUESTIONS? appears on the screen behind her.

  “Enlighten me,” Dorian says, and Lucy squirms under his gaze. She’s afraid of losing funding.

  “It’d be like the apocalypse.” She laughs nervously. “It’d just spread until it hit a system smarter than it was.”

  Dorian folds his hands behind his back. “And… at this point in
your project, aren’t most systems smarter than it is? What’s the reason for all the delays?”

  “Computer science is the process of solving unsolved problems.” She holds her hands close to her chest, pulling on her fingers as if she’s wringing a washcloth. “So, you know, I don’t think it’s easy to put an exact delivery date on—” He watches her waffle. Her answers are vague and insipid, and project managers have delivered code for centuries now. Even her growing panic is uninteresting— it’s like playing a game without an opponent.

  “Are you from the same Biltmores as the North Carolina Biltmores?” he asks, interrupting a string of vocalized pauses. “Like, the big estate there?”

  She smiles, overly toothy beneath her swollen lips.

  “I… don’t know.”

  Dorian shrugs. “Okay. Just curious.”

  He turns. “Next project.”

  3

  THE KENNELS

  They file through hallways and away from the common area. The safety lighting here is uncomfortably bright, and the floor and walls have been treated with some sort of polymer coating. They reach a bend in the corridor, and a tremendous vault door sprawls before them, covered over in various biohazard warnings.

  It takes all of Dorian’s composure not to roll his eyes. A genetic weapon is easy to control in space. A virus won’t propagate through airless chambers. In the worst-case scenario, everyone on the research facility dies, but the virus is contained. Yet they’ve locked off Glitter Edifice even from the rest of the SCIF.

  Again, multiple keys and multiple codes come out. Blue assists this time, with her own codes and biometrics. A loud klaxon sounds, and a computerized voice fills the intercoms.

  “Kennels open. Logged access, Doctor Blue Marsalis.”

  “Juno keeps an extra special eye on this place,” Anne says.

  Blazing chartreuse covers the hallways beyond, and where most of the station contains exposed pipes and ductwork, Glitter Edifice has only bare walls with black text signs to direct them. Dorian cocks his head.