“Yes,” said Erik. “An asteroid off the elliptical plane. Argitori has millions of those, they were well hidden provided they did not draw attention to themselves.”
“And the base was not originally a hacksaw base?”
“No. Chah’nas Empire, we think. There was no sign of a spaceship… though in a local system, hacksaws can make local journeys without them, it only takes basic propulsion.”
“Yes,” Nalben agreed. “They do that in hive bases today — send out probes too small to show up on scans, with ion drives that take years to complete surveys and return. Years do not concern AIs, they are patient.”
“Hacksaws in trouble during the deepynine-drysine war could have just abandoned a damaged vessel to make their way to an asteroid,” Romki ventured. “They don’t need escape pods or shuttles. Seven thousand years later, the chah’nas build a new base, and when the chah’nas fall and everyone abandons it, the queen and her tribe move in.”
“Many possibilities,” Nalben agreed, gazing at the tank. “Too many.”
“You’ve encountered others like her before?” Erik pressed.
“Queens and command units? Yes. Never before a drysine.”
Utter silence in the engineering bay, save for the omnipresent whir of ventilation, cylinder rotation and machinery from neighbouring bays. “How many were there?” Trace asked quietly. “At this level, before the war?”
“Probably hundreds,” said Nalben. “A very small number, considering the size of the drysine faction at the time. They were not necessarily the most numerous faction — other factions took their side or the deepynines. But the drysines were elite, perhaps the most advanced ever. Possibly the most intelligent, if we are qualified to judge that. The parren and their allies tagged all the command units and made a special effort to kill them all. They took appalling losses trying, because they knew that should even one command unit survive, it could resurrect the entire AI race, given enough time alone in the dark. For many thousands of years, Dobruta experts supposed that the parren had succeeded in wiping out all drysine command units. Now you have proven otherwise.” He looked at Romki. “You say that someone or something began communications with her before the attack on Joma Station?”
Romki nodded. “Yes, it was some kind of machine-language signal. It interfaced with the intact portions of her brain, the automated functions. I think one of them is communications. We could show you that recording, I’m sure?” With a glance at Erik.
“That would be useful, but I think it’s quite clear what happened here.” Nalben looked at Erik. “The drones that attacked Joma Station were drysine too.”
Erik frowned. “But they were reprogrammed?”
“Yes. I think it logical that the sard have found a ship building base, as we suspected. And that shipbuilding base is drysine. It had advanced shipbuilding technology, which they utilised, lacking such advanced tools themselves. And it had deactivated drysine combat drones aboard, which they reactivated, and reprogrammed to do their bidding. Communications with the automated function of a dead hacksaw queen’s brain is quite difficult for a non-drysine, the codes are complex. But a drysine drone could do it.”
“They were looking for her?” Lisbeth gasped.
“Yes,” said Nalben. “But not in a good way. They were being used to find her. Whether they wanted her destroyed, or reclaimed for some reason, we cannot say.”
“You mean to say that the reason Phoenix is being chased by the sard is because of her?” Erik asked, pointing at the nano-tank. “They’re after her? Not us?”
“That would be my guess,” Nalben agreed sombrely. “Nothing else makes sense. Phoenix is a human political curiosity. Sard have no interest in such things. But old hacksaw technology, they’ve demonstrated great interest in. The last remaining drysine queen of that entire empire? Valuable does not even begin to describe it. If they seek to leverage what she might know.”
“I don’t buy it,” Trace declared, arms folded firmly. Everyone looked at her. “That’s a hell of a move to make, even for sard. Hacksaws have attacked ships before, in the modern era, but rarely stations. In fact, I can’t recall it happening before to a station that big in centuries.”
“Human records are incomplete,” Nalben said solemnly. “It is very rare in other regions, with species tavalai are familiar with. But it has happened.”
“Whatever,” said Trace with determination. “Sard are murderous and often suicidal in their aggression, but this was overplaying their hand. They’ve just declared that they have hacksaw technology, despite knowing how poorly that will be received by tavalai and by humans.”
“Lately they have lost all respect for tavalai,” said Nalben. “Dobruta have no teeth in sard space any more. And many sard still consider themselves at war with humanity, and that the surrender agreement was a weak and irrelevant tavalai document.”
“Sard aren’t leaders,” Trace continued, undeterred. “They’re followers. They followed the tavalai. Now they’re following old hacksaw technology. They’re no good at any of their own technology except computing. They love maths. Machine logic no doubt appeals to them.”
Erik’s eyes widened as he looked at her. “Go on.”
“What if this isn’t their idea? What if coming after us, after the queen, after Major General Connor, was someone else’s idea? What if they didn’t just find deactivated drysine drones at that ship building base? Or what if we go back even further than that? We pulled up alongside an alo ship at Heuron. All our dead hacksaws reactivated.” Looking at Commander Nalben.
Nalben stared. “They did?”
Trace nodded. “They were responding to something emitting from the alo ship, some kind of command and control frequency hidden in their energy signature. Stan, you’re the one with the whole alo-deepynine conspiracy theory, and Lieutenant Dale’s report of his conversations with Chankow pretty much confirm it. What if, in that moment when we pulled up alongside that alo ship, they knew exactly what we had on board? What if they talked to the queen then, just as you saw before the attack on Joma?”
“We wouldn’t have known,” Romki murmured, incredulous. “She wasn’t rigged up to anything then, we had no way to measure it.”
“The deepynines and the drysines fought the biggest, nastiest war the Spiral has ever seen,” Trace continued. “We think it’s over. Assume Stan’s right, and the deepynines are somehow still alive, and allied with the alo. They thought they’d won. No more drysines. Until we park alongside them with a drysine queen.”
“Oh wow,” said Romki, and put his bald head in his hand. “Major you are an evil genius. Yes yes yes… look, they’re hunting us. They’re hunting her.” He pointed at the nano-tank. “Deepynines don’t like organics, but they absolutely despise drysines. Drysines are their ultimate, existential threat. Drysines exterminated their race. Evidently they’ve rebuilt with alo help, and their very worst horror story would be for us to help the drysines do the same. Which we’re not going to do, but the deepynines don’t know that!”
“They’re trying to wipe out the drysines again like the parren did,” Erik murmured. “By any means necessary. That means they’re using the sard.”
Romki nodded vigorously. “Bribing them with gifts of technology! Visions of power! I’ll bet you they’ve sent a queen of their own to the sard’s new shipbuilding base. I bet she’s running the whole show from there, helping them to reprogram drysine drones — even sard computing tech wouldn’t allow that, but a deepynine queen could do it. And would tell them how to use those drones, and what to use them on if sard want to keep getting deepynine help. I mean… who hates a drysine queen more than a deepynine queen? And will be more determined to stop at nothing to get her?”
“Well hang on,” Erik cautioned. “That implies she’s not actually dead.”
“Yes,” said Nalben, as though wondering if that comment was safe to answer. “Well technically speaking, she’s probably not.”
21
Thr
ee hours and a lot of long conversations with Makimakala later, Erik and his command crew were clustered in his quarters. All were tired, as it was the middle of the ‘night’ as the first-shift body clock measured such things, but Erik did not feel himself at all impaired. There was an electricity in the room, a strange mix of serious intensity and excitement, that he’d never felt before. Being here was crazy. What their mad political circumstance had abruptly transformed into, against all expectations, was certainly frightening, yet Erik felt it was a preferable kind of fear to what they’d faced before. That fear had come with no upside. This fear came with adrenaline.
“Captain Pram says there’s an old AI base,” he told the crew. Trace sat in her customary spot, against the wall where his pillow normally was. Shahaim sat on his other side, Kaspowitz on his desk chair, with Shilu and Karle squeezed behind him. Erik sometimes suspected that the main reason the captain’s quarters had so little room was to regulate the number of people who could attend command briefings. More than six was a bad idea, and wouldn’t fit anyway. “The base is in Bonatai System. It’s a drysine relic, about twenty six thousand years old.”
“Why haven’t the Dobruta destroyed it?” Shahaim asked. “They’re supposed to destroy all AI tech they find.”
“Because they’re hypocrites?” Kaspowitz suggested.
“My Great Uncle Thani Gialidis once told me that necessity will make hypocrites of us all,” said Erik. “But he’s a politician, so he would say that. Captain Pram says they don’t have a choice — the tavalai politicians won’t let the Dobruta police sard space and continually strangle their funding. They don’t have the resources to fully analyse hacksaw bases for intelligence before destroying them. This base is apparently very big, it would take lots of people to analyse it properly. So they’ve mothballed it instead, so as not to destroy the intel.”
“And tavalai fleet command is okay with that?” Shilu asked skeptically.
“I was given the impression that they have no idea.”
Eyebrows were raised around the group. “We might have more in common with Makimakala than we thought,” Trace observed, munching stir fry from a container. “We both have leaders who hate us.”
“One of the reasons they’ve mothballed it,” Erik continued, “is that it has some very fancy databases that even the best Dobruta techs have not been able to access. They think if they can read it, it will provide them with a good map of all the drysine and other bases and facilities through all this region of space. Including the big lost shipbuilding facility we think the sard are using to make those fancy new ships of theirs.”
“So why do they think they can recover that data now?” Kaspowitz wondered.
Erik took a deep breath. They weren’t going to like this bit. “Because they now have access to something they never thought they’d get access to. A drysine queen. They think, though they’re not sure, that it’s possible to recover the drysine neural data storage codings from examining her brain. Which will be like acquiring a code breaker, allowing them to read the stuff in the base.”
“Thus learning where our true target is,” Shahaim said thoughtfully.
“Exactly.”
“So what’s the problem?” Karle wondered, eyeing Erik’s reluctant expression with suspicion. Lieutenant Karle was one kid who, on this trip, was becoming less green by the day.
“We’ll have to partially reactivate the queen’s brain to do it.”
Stares all around. “No,” said Shahaim. “Absolutely not.
“They think it can be done safely,” Erik insisted. “And in a limited way. Not a full reawakening. An accessing of dormant memory and linguistic function.”
“Oh yeah, that’s a great idea,” said Kaspowitz. “Because we know hacksaws are so damn easy to control once they start waking up, right? This is a queen… the drone technology is ridiculous enough, the queen’s on a whole different level.”
“You can’t just isolate those functions one at a time,” Shilu agreed with alarm. “I’ve had a look at it in my off-time… that stuff’s just crazy, Romki doesn’t understand it, even Rooke doesn’t understand it. All those neural systems are integrated, and if you wake one up, you’ll wake up the others…”
“Yeah hang on,” Erik shut him off, holding up a hand. “She’s a disembodied head with a hole blown straight through her CPU…”
“Who can reprogram our ship computers by remote as far as we know!” said Shahaim. “And she doesn’t have a central processing unit, that whole neural structure is completely decentralised, that’s part of what makes them so hard to kill! Once she becomes familiar with our systems, we just don’t know what she’s capable of doing…”
“I think it’s an excellent idea,” Trace interrupted. Everyone save Erik looked at her with incredulity… and remembered, as it was sometimes necessary to remember, that Trace was never sarcastic. As was usual in command meetings, she looked deadly serious. “We’ve found a hacksaw threat. Whether it’s connected to the alo, or the sard, or both, or neither, we need to treat it the same as any other threat. You fight threats by first attempting to understand them. If we’re so scared of this threat that we don’t dare even attempt to understand it, then we’ve lost before the fight even starts.”
No one replied. It was hard to argue with, particularly when it came from her, effectively calling them all cowards.
“Right,” said Erik, having little doubt that he hadn’t heard the last of it, no matter how persuasive his marine commander. “The plan is that we head to Bonatai System, find the relic, and Makimakala will board and disable the booby traps they’ve put there to stop any curious people who found it in the meantime. Given our luck lately, I doubt it will be that simple, but maybe we’re due an easy run.”
“What about Rai Jang?” asked Shahaim, still unhappy.
“I imagine she’s coming too. We haven’t had any contact besides the routine stuff, we’re too busy, but my impression is they’re talking to Makimakala. Barabo are tavalai allies, not human, at least for the moment… and Captain Jen is very concerned about any threats to the barabo. Given he’s just seen his station torn up by hacksaws, I’d guess he wants to get to the bottom of this, if only to go back to his government and beg for more ships.”
He looked about at them. There was more to be said, but for now it was enough.
“Oh,” said Shahaim, recognising the meeting was nearly over. “First-shift procedural, there will be memorial service at 1400. We’ll be too busy for uniforms, but there will be flags in b-2 mainroom, shipwide prayer and trumpets at 1410.”
Somber nods all around.
“And then,” Shahaim added with forced enthusiasm, “you’ll never guess what day navcomp says it is today, because I had completely forgotten. It’s Exodus. And god knows how navcomp calculates these things across hundreds of lightyears based upon a time system from a world that Exodus commemorates us losing…” She gave Kaspowitz an accusing look. He shrugged. “Anyway, today is Exodus, so at 1730, to give second-shift a chance to do other duties first, we’ll do that service as well, then we’ll play the B9, and the usual. So some warrants are going to be very busy today.”
Because ship warrant officers and petty officers usually got stuck with ceremonial stuff, particularly on operations when the senior crew were too busy. Her glance at Erik suggested he might want to cancel it, given everything else.
“Yes they will be busy,” Erik said instead. It would do no one on Phoenix any good, he was certain, to forget who they were and where they came from. Out here, surrounded by aliens, there had never been a better time to remember what it meant to be human, and what they were ultimately all fighting for. “Is that it? Good, let’s go.”
As they filed out of the captain’s cabin at the rear of the bridge, Erik found Lieutenant JC Crozier of Delta Platoon waiting — for Trace, he assumed. And was surprised when she spoke to him instead. “LC, could I have a moment?”
Trace gave her a concerned look as she passed, but
Crozier wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Of course Lieutenant, come in.” The cabin emptied, he invited her inside and shut the door. “Go ahead.”
She stood firmly at ease, hands tight behind her back, feet apart. Erik was accustomed to seeing her so cool and confident, but now she looked neither. “Sir, I wanted to apologise.”
Erik frowned. “For what?”
“I had dock command on Joma Station when the hacksaws hit. When the Major took command she immediately countermanded my tactical stance, and went full deployment up the dock. It changed the tactical situation immediately.” She swallowed hard. “I screwed up sir. Seventeen spacers died on station, all on my watch. Spacers without armour or serious weapons, relying on my marines for protection. I owe you and all the spacers on Phoenix an apology. I’m sorry.”
The pain of it hit Erik in the gut. It was every officer’s nightmare — personal failure, costing the lives of fellow crew. JC Crozier had been an officer in the marine corps for twelve years, all of them in combat. She’d been posted to Phoenix four years ago, when the previous commander of Delta Platoon had been killed in action. Trace rated all of her Lieutenants very highly — Dale at the top, for sheer experience, then Crozier, Zhi and Jalawi about equal in the middle, with Alomaim still a little green, but with enormous potential.
He felt slightly ridiculous with her apologising to him. His combat experience was minimal next to hers, and indeed next to all the marine officers save Alomaim. She was about his age, but had seen so much more of the war.
Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) Page 28
