His Majesty's Starship

by Ben Jeapes

  “Then stay there. Good day.”

  *

  Peter still lived in shared quarters so Samad invited him back to the Loonat-Dereshev apartment in ‘C’ wheel – closer and more congenial. Their aides were still on Ark Royal; they had to stop off at a public terminal so Samad could send instructions ahead to the apartment to shut down storage mode and purge itself of preserving gas. While that was happening he contacted the ship and told them about Leroux. Gilmore was furious but powerless to help. More practically, Hannah said she would send over their uniforms and aides. Then they headed off to the apartment.

  Samad came out of the kitchen with two coffees to find Peter browsing through the apartment’s wall terminal. “Having fun?” he said.

  Peter half looked up, absorbed in the display. “Mind if I use this?”

  “Feel free.” Samad put the coffee down next to him. “What are you doing?”

  “One of the meteor lasers shot at Sharman. No witnesses, Mr Leroux said.”

  “And?”

  “He was wrong ...” Peter said. His voice trailed off and Samad recognised the signs: Peter had just found an interesting problem to tackle in the virtual world and the real world didn’t exist for him anymore.

  “Access denied,” said the terminal. Peter looked up again.

  “Where do you keep your override codes?”

  “My what?” Samad would have laughed in other circumstances. “I’m just an engineer.”

  Peter pulled a face. “Oh, yes. In that case I need my aide.”

  “Well, it might be here by now. Would you like me to get it?”

  “If you could,” Peter said seriously. “I’ll lay some groundwork here until you get back.”

  “You want-” Samad said, amazed, but Peter was already absorbed again. “Sure. I’ll just mosey on down and pick our things up, hey?”

  “Uh-huh ...” Peter murmured; a polite social cue to show he had heard someone say something, and that was all the attention he was giving it.

  “It’s not as if there was any kind of disparity in our ranks, after all, is it?”

  “Uh-huh ...”

  “Do you have irony on Mars?”

  No answer. Samad swigged his coffee down and left.

  *

  R.V. Krishnamurthy stepped onto the floor of Shivaji’s boat bay and ignored the honour guard of twenty NVN who promptly snapped to attention. He bore down on Secretary Ranjitsinhji like a bird of prey.

  “We will speak in my stateroom,” he said, “now.”

  Five minutes later, he said, “You blithering incompetent, Subhas.” The door was shut and two NVN stood on guard outside. “You inept dolt. You unqualified ass. What the hell went wrong?”

  Ranjitsinhji barely blinked under the tirade. Krishnamurthy thought of his calm facade as a hologram, like those erected over badly worn statues to show them as they had once been: surely, under the false image, the man must be withering.

  “My agent made a mistake,” he said.

  “A mistake? A mistake? I wanted the prince killed and your agent assassinated his father! A head of state! Never do that, Subhas. Never, ever, ever. Heads of state are blackmailed, disgraced, overthrown, struck down by their own people with a secure force behind them. But to strike one down from outside ... madness! The enemy binds together in sympathy, everyone remembers the victim’s good points and none of his bad and, worst of all, the guard around the new head of state is tripled. To strike at James Windsor now will be nigh on impossible. Well?”

  Ranjitsinhji bowed his head. “Excellency, my agent was possessed of a very literal frame of mind. He heard Sharman’s pilot refer to ‘His Highness’ and, knowing this to be the correct designation for Prince James, assumed the target to be on board.”

  Krishnamurthy frowned. “You have actually managed to communicate with your agent since the attack?”

  “No, Excellency, but we have a duplicate on board with us. The same data was fed to him and that was the conclusion he drew. He was surprised to learn that not all humans are aware of the correct forms of address for royalty.”

  “You’ve got a dupli-... Your agent is an AI?”

  “He was, Excellency.” Ranjitsinhji let a small, proud smile slip out. “Ostensibly a specialist in air conditioning. An entirely harmless model was introduced quite legally to UK-1 eight years ago, and since then it has gradually been upgraded, bit by bit. Its primary purpose was always the gathering of intelligence but it was ideally placed for this venture, too.”

  Krishnamurthy had to be graceful. “That, Subhas, is almost – I say, almost – brilliant. A shame that its brilliance is entirely negated by your ghastly blunder.” Ranjitsinhji, who had been on the verge of letting his small smile of pride grow larger, flinched at the abrupt change of tone. Krishnamurthy was pleased to see it. His junior had bungled catastrophically and could not, in the course of this interview, be allowed to forget it. “What do you mean, was?” he added, as Ranjitsinhji’s interesting choice of tense came back to him.

  “Naturally, it was ordered to self-destruct after the job was done, Excellency.”

  “A most convenient form of assassin,” Krishnamurthy conceded with a nod. “Now you are going to tell me it was our only AI on board UK-1, are you not?”

  “I am, Excellency,” said Ranjitsinhji, and Krishnamurthy could see the man was wondering how he knew. Because it’s so consistent, Subhas. Because I know that once you have a good idea you want to implement it at once, confident that just because it is a good idea it needs no form of support or backup or redundancy. You don’t do things by halves, you do them by ones, which is just as bad.

  “So,” Krishnamurthy said, “we had an undetectable assassin, ideally placed to strike the designated target; we gave him a suicide pill and a gun with one shot, and he missed and took the pill anyway. Useless, Subhas. Absolutely useless. Why didn’t you have your AI rewrite itself, say? Or rewrite another, to make it look like the other was the perpetrator? You just don’t think ahead, Subhas. All your eggs were in one basket. Never do that! Never again.”

  At the word “again’, a subtle form of relief almost slipped out from beneath Ranjitsinhji’s mask. Ranjitsinhji now knew that this wasn’t the end of his career: if he could last out this audience, he would be back in what passed for Krishnamurthy’s favour.

  “I shall apply myself personally to tidying up your mess, Subhas,” Krishnamurthy said. “Await further orders, and now leave me.”

  Ranjitsinhji bowed his head again and put his hands together. “I thank you for your clemency in the face of my inexcusable ineptitude, Excellency,” he said.

  “Go away.”

  Amazingly, Ranjitsinhji continued to hold his ground. “Excellency, for my further elucidation, and although I am aware your plans are on a plane of complexity I can never hope to achieve in this lifetime, I must still ask one question.”

  Intrigued, Krishnamurthy said, “go on.”

  “The intended target was Prince James and yet, regardless of the fact that no head of state, as you have said, should be removed by outside elements, all logic indicates that if anyone should have been assassinated, it would have been in the best interests of the Confederation for that person to be King Richard. I have tried and tried, but I simply cannot see how the death of Prince James could have been advantageous to us.”

  Krishnamurthy drew himself up. He could have sacked Ranjitsinhji there and then for blatant insubordination. But, sadly, it was necessary to explain things to the man. He had succeeded, against all the odds. He had won the bid for the Roving, and all the old fools back in Delhi would suddenly spot that Krishnamurthy was now incredibly powerful and would want some of that power for themselves. Krishnamurthy could not afford to have enemies in his own camp. He needed more than Ranjitsinhji’s obedience – he needed the man’s understanding and acceptance.

  “You might have noticed we have to share our new-found power, Subhas,” he said, “and who would you rather share it with? A man with no heir, p
ast middle age, and a wife and daughters who don’t want to know him? Or a man not yet at middle age, with a secure power base, all his life ahead of him and the reputation amongst his peers of the man who secured the deal for the Roving?”

  He could see the coin dropping.

  “That will be all, Subhas,” Krishnamurthy said. “Now, make yourself useful by monitoring as many of UK-1’s systems as you can. Use any method as long as it’s discreet. I want to know how much they know, how much they suspect and what they intend to do about it. I want to know everything. We will, we must retrieve something from this wreckage. Something, anything. Start now.”

  - 25 -

  25 May 2149

  Midshipman Gilmore had heard of the Great Black Hole of UK-1 – the area in ‘N’ wheel so comprehensively classified that any information about it just got swallowed up. And now he was in there.

  The king was dead, but life went on and the black armbands were the only concession to the feeling on board UK-1. Joel arrived at work for the start of his shift, as normal, only to discover that his work didn’t exist anymore. All the displays leading to his portion of flight control were dead, the connections severed. His work detail was instead sent down to the Great Black Hole where they were met outside a compartment by the Head of Security himself.

  Mr Leroux stood with his back to the door marked. “You’re here at the request of Superluminary,” he said, prompting a delighted buzz of confirmed speculation from the middies. Everyone knew what was down here but no one was supposed to know. “And you all know damn well what’s it about,” Leroux added. “There’s some scut work they need doing. What you’re about to see is top secret.” The sour expression that the satirists loved so much was even sourer at the prospect of his beloved secrets becoming known to a wider audience. “You all work in a classified area anyway, so we’re minimising the spread of restricted information by bringing you here. Stepping through that door will be taken as acquiescence to the Security Act. You may leave now if you wish.”

  Joel thought of how he had happily blabbed about his work to his father in the Captain’s Club, and cringed inside. His father was the great Captain Gilmore whose exploits were already the stuff of legend, so surely that was okay ... but Joel decided he would keep quiet about this.

  And then they were inside. It was a large compartment and unhappy-looking Superluminary staff stood around a large cube, twice the height of an adult. Thick, high voltage power leads lay around it, all recently disconnected. Like Joel’s displays at work, all the instruments around the room were dead.

  They were handed over to the mercy of the senior Super-el present. “The entire interior of this module is to be dismantled,” she said. “Floors, ceilings, partitions, bulkheads, everything.”

  Joel looked around, taking in the cube and the size of the room, estimating the amount of work. It was going to be a long, hard day.

  *

  Leroux looked at the display of the aide that Peter Kirton was holding out to him.

  “What about it?” he said.

  “There’s your assassin,” said Peter.

  “An AI? Don’t be absurd.”

  Peter shrugged. “Fine. I’ll bring the evidence to the enquiry. See you then.”

  He was halfway to the door when Leroux spoke. “Very dramatic, Lieutenant. All right, you’ve got a minute to convince me.”

  Peter came back and sat down. “You said there weren’t any witnesses. To a shot fired from a highly automated system like the meteor lasers? You had hundreds of witnesses. Several hundred AIs in the immediate vicinity.”

  “AI testimony is not valid in court,” Leroux pointed out, in his best you-do-your-job-I’ll-do-mine tone.

  “And?” Peter said. “Are you saying they can’t even give useful pointers?” He leaned forward, hands clasped on the desktop in front of him. “Mr Leroux, to fire that laser, at least three AIs of varying degrees of intelligence would have been involved. Now, the testimony of mentally challenged humans might not be admissible in a court, but if a murderer ran through a crowd of them, I’d at least ask if they saw anyone and which way he went.”

  “Go on,” said Leroux.

  “There are check gates throughout the UK-1 net and no AI can pass through them without its number being recorded. Seven hundred and seventy three AIs were in the vicinity of that laser when it fired. Seventeen, in my professional opinion, could quite reasonably have done it. They were all connected to the laser mechanism in one way or another.”

  “Oh, brilliant,” Leroux said. “I’ll just ask those seventeen and of course, the one who did it won’t lie to me, will it?”

  “You can’t ask all seventeen,” Peter said, “because I’ve only been able to track down sixteen. The seventeenth has vanished.”

  “Vanished?”

  “Vanished. Now, every AI on UK-1 has a function, most of them are technical. I scanned the systems and detected a four percent decrease in the efficiency of the air conditioning. Don’t worry, it’s been compensated for, no one’s going to suffocate. But that decrease was caused by the disappearance of-”

  “-one of the seventeen?”

  “Correct.” Peter paused to study Leroux. The other man’s sceptical expression was still there but perhaps he was getting through. “Some fragments of code were found in the defence net and from their characteristics I’d estimate a 62% chance of them being the remains of the AI that’s disappeared. Of course, that bit’s just circumstantial.”

  “That it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I see.” Leroux sat back and looked at him through narrow eyes. “You’ve done more than any of my people, Lieutenant.”

  “Maybe I’m better than any of your people.”

  “Some might say, suspiciously more.”

  Peter frowned, then his eyes widened. “You’re kidding! You think I knew about it anyway?”

  “You said it. I didn’t.” Leroux smirked. “Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I want you to go over exactly the same steps you’ve described, on my own systems, with one of my own people watching you.”

  “Oh, come on! I was hoping you’d let us get back to work.”

  “Not possible.” Leroux stood. “Follow me, Lieutenant. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, you and me.”

  *

  It was indeed a long, hard day but it was almost over. The work had extended well beyond their regular shift but the unusual promise of double time pay kept them going.

  Now there was a gaping hole where once there had been a couple of decks and several compartments. For some reason, it reminded Joel of cutting out a tumour from the healthy flesh of UK-1. Every one of UK-1’s wheels was divided into hundreds of separate, airtight modules linked seamlessly together, and the entire module here had been gouged out. The excision extended as far as the outer skin of UK-1 and that was what he was now standing on.

  The step-through generator hung a few feet above the outer skin on a hoist. Then came the most bizarre order to date: they were to suit up. The module was depressurised and a hole was cut in the floor under the generator.

  A garbage scow was already outside in space, hanging from the underside of the module directly below the generator with its doors open and inviting. A safety net was slung below it to prevent equipment and personnel falling off into space.

  “Next job,” said the head of the detail, pointing at the generator and then at the scow. “Put that into that.”

  They did as they were told, and then the last job of the shift was to go outside and move the scow round UK-1 to a vacant berth on the docking strake. Another detail was waiting there to take over. Joel’s shift said goodbye to the scow and headed inside, where all memory of the day was banished from the mind of a tired and hungry midshipman by the thought of food and bed.

  *

  Subhas Ranjitsinhji read from the aide in his hand. R.V. Krishnamurthy sat at his desk and stared silently into space, listening with fingers steepled in front of him.
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br />   “The inquiry is still proceeding,” Ranjitsinhji said. “They appear to have deduced that an AI was involved and are busy trying to trace it.”

  “Will they succeed?”

  “No, Excellency. The AI was introduced to UK-1 by an agent using the identity of a genuine Euro citizen with no ties to the Confederation.”

  “Well done. Proceed.”

  “You asked for every item of information we had picked up from UK-1 ...” Ranjitsinhji trailed off and Krishnamurthy raised an eyebrow. His junior’s tone verged perilously on the critical; another instance of his slowly emerging insubordination. Ranjitsinhji could not see why his master would want to know everything – and that, Krishnamurthy felt, was why he was an Excellency and Ranjitsinhji was just a Secretary.

  “I did,” he said. “What do you have?”

  Ranjitsinhji paused just a moment before speaking. “Understand that this has been gleaned by our AIs from uncoded transmissions that we have picked up. It really cannot be taken as a definitive summary of UK-1’s position on anything.”

  The man would never learn. Krishnamurthy had picked up a good deal of information in his time from casual, uncoded transmissions. It just needed a little intuition; the ability to glide over a sea of innocuous facts and pick out the ones that felt different. “Proceed,” he said.

  “An external maintenance team has been overhauling the fusion tubes. Routine. They have asked for and received permission from the Rusties to fire a scientific instrument package out of the plane of orbit. Discussion in the Admiralty as to whether Ark Royal’s captain and crew should be decorated. A slight increase in energy gained from the onboard mass converters. Preparations continue for the king’s funeral; all delegates are invited to attend ...”

  It went on; the myriad tiny details that represented the smooth running of UK-1. “Let me see,” Krishnamurthy said at the end. Ranjitsinhji handed him the aide and waited with his hands behind his back.

  Krishnamurthy scanned the list of items and waited for the old feeling to return. Something might strike a jarring note. It would all appear quite harmless but something would set off that subconscious reaction. It was like seeing something in the corner of your eye: the secret was not to look at it directly. Look around it, let it grow in your peripheral vision ...