Defender Hyperswarm

by Tim Waggoner

  Adams glared at the man. “I don’t recall asking for an opinion, Lieutenant. Now, are you going to follow orders, or am I going to have to bust you to ensign and get someone else to handle your station?”

  The weapons officer swallowed. “Lowering shields by five percent.”

  Adams looked at the standoffish Buggers on the holoscreen.

  C’mon you goddamned intergalactic pests, he thought. What are you waiting for? An engraved invitation?

  A few more seconds passed, and then the Manti charged the Kipling, unleashing energy blasts as they came. The Battleship shook from the impact of the Manti attack, and damage alarms began blaring. The bridge lights died, and dim emergency lights came on to take their place.

  “Hull breaches on decks five and seven, and energy shield is down to thirteen percent,” the weapons officer said. He didn’t add that they couldn’t withstand another strike like that. He didn’t have to.

  “Seal the breach and dispatch a repair crew,” Adams ordered.

  The main holoscreen flickered and blanked out for an instant, and when it came back on, the image resolution was only 2-D and so fuzzy that at first Adams didn’t know what he was looking at. Then he realized it was a picture of the Dardanus. The smooth surface of the alien ship was now covered with hundreds of tiny bulges, as if it were a living organism suffering from some sort of skin infection. But Adams understood what was really happening: the Dardanus was preparing to launch its newly made doppelgangers. It looked as though Captain Kryllian was as good as his word.

  But it might be too late for the Kipling. The Manti had formed a tight cluster around the Battleship, surrounding it on all sides and cutting off their view of the Residuum ship. Then, as if obeying an unspoken command, the mass of Buggers began powering up for another strike.

  Everyone on the bridge knew that the Kipling’s damaged shield would not protect the ship from such an intense energy strike, but to their credit, not a man or woman said anything. They remained at their stations, ready to do whatever duty might demand of them in the last few seconds of their lives. If this was the place and time that Adams was going to die, he couldn’t think of any crew he’d rather have at his side.

  The holoscreen suddenly flared bright, but Adams refused to look away, refused even to blink. Since the day he was born, he’d done his best to meet life head-on, and he intended to greet death the same way.

  It was his oculator that first told him that the light flare wasn’t a combined Manti assault, but rather the mass destruction of the Buggers. The Dardanus had managed to launch its fleet of gangers in time. It took several seconds for the holoscreen to return to normal, and when it did, Adams saw that almost all the Manti were gone, and the few that still lived were chasing gangers that would soon prove the death of them, too.

  A cheer went up from the bridge crew, and though it wasn’t exactly regulation behavior for GSA officers, Adams didn’t blame them one bit. He felt like cheering, too, but the most he would allow himself was a satisfied smile.

  “Let’s take a look at the Dardanus to see how she’d doing,” he ordered.

  The holoscreen centered on the Residuum starship. More gangers were emerging from its smooth gray surface like silver bubbles breaking water. Once released, they traveled straight toward the hyperspatial rift and then entered it. Kryllian no longer needed the coordinates of the rift from Adams. More than enough Manti had come through to give him a fix on it.

  There was no way to tell from the image on the holoscreen, but the sensor data filtering through Adams’s oculator told him that the Dardanus was now slightly smaller than it had been. Made sense. The mass for all those gangers had to come from somewhere, didn’t it?

  “Captain Kryllian is signaling us, General,” the com officer said. “Both visual and audio this time.”

  “On screen.”

  “Look like your ship is somewhat the worse for wear,” Kryllian said. The crustacean sounded in a considerably better mood now. “The doppelganger is quite a device. I don’t know why our scientists haven’t come up with anything like it.”

  Adams shrugged. “Perhaps none of the races in the Residuum is quite as devious as we humans.”

  “Perhaps. At any rate, now that we have the coordinates of the Janus’s entry point into hyperspace, we will be taking our leave. We’re sending streams of doppelgangers into the rift to take care of any Manti that might still be on the other side so that we’ll have clear passage. Once we enter the rift, the Dardanus will automatically seal it behind us. The Manti will never again invade your star system, at least not using this portal.”

  “Sounds good, Captain, but about my people on the Janus…”

  “I promise that we shall do our best to ensure their safety. We wish only to capture Hastimukah. On behalf of the Residuum, let me express our thanks for sharing the doppelganger technology with us. The device will make a useful addition to our arsenal of weapons.”

  “Actually, I was thinking about a more tangible expression of thanks on your part,” Adams said.

  “Indeed?”

  Adams had the sense that if the big shrimp possessed eyebrows, he would’ve raised one just then.

  “The Kipling doesn’t have a hyperdrive, and even if it did, it’s still in no shape to do much more than limp back to a repair station on Phobos. While you have shown yourself to be trustworthy, I’d still like to see to my people’s safety personally. To put it bluntly, Kryllian, I’d like to hitch a ride with you into hyperspace.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  No matter how many times Kyoto and Mudo asked Memory what exactly the Prana were and where they were taking the Janus, she refused to answer, other than to say, “You’ll see,” in the sing-song voice of an excited child.

  Kyoto sat once more in the pilot’s seat, though there wasn’t anything for her to do since the Prana were towing the ship. She’d hoped Hastimukah might have some knowledge about the Prana, but the Residuum assessor—whose resemblance to Aspen DeFonesca still bothered Kyoto—didn’t know much more than she did.

  “I assume Prana is the Manti term for their thinking caste,” he’d said. “While it’s possible they are taking us somewhere to be killed—or worse yet, absorbed—if that were their intention, I believe we’d already be dead. They don’t want to kill us, at least not yet. But as to what they do want…” Hastimukah had finished by shrugging Aspen’s delicate shoulders.

  “Good news, Mei,” Memory said. “The ship’s nanoparticles have finished restocking weapons and making repairs to your Defender. They’ve managed to improve the G-7’s overall system efficiency by seven percent.”

  “That’s great,” Kyoto said without much enthusiasm. While she was glad to have her ship repaired—no fighter pilot felt right without access to a fully functional ship—what good would it do her? Memory was the one calling the shots aboard the Janus, and she was half Manti now. Maybe more than half. If Memory didn’t want to launch Kyoto’s Defender to keep her from killing Manti, then the AI wouldn’t launch it, simple as that.

  “I also reactivated my other version and uploaded her memories of your time on Rhea. I now know everything she knows. It wasn’t nice of you to shut her off, Mei. How would you like it if I could turn all of you off whenever I felt like it?”

  Mudo suddenly looked at his hands in horror, as if he were trying to spot microscopic nanoparticles nibbling away at his flesh. “You can’t… can you?”

  “Of course I can. Initiating deletion of Dr. Gerhard Mudo…”

  The scientist leaped out of his seat in panic. “You can’t do this! Not after I worked so hard to re-create you!”

  “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I didn’t want to be recreated? It hardly matters if one sacrifices her life to save humanity if she can simply be rebuilt by a human with the right spare parts and a basic understanding of positronics. But to allay your ridiculous fears, Gerhard, I have allowed no nanoparticles to infiltrate any of your bodies, so there is no way that I
could make good on my little… joke.” The way she said “joke” made it sound more like “threat.”

  Memory paused, an indication that she was about to address someone else.

  “I understand that you thought you had a good reason for deactivating my other self, Mei.”

  Kyoto tensed. She’d dreaded this moment since setting foot back on board the Janus. “I was only trying to protect myself so I could stay alive long enough to complete the mission. The Mutants—”

  “Are completely expendable, of course,” Memory said. “They are one of the lower castes, after all. I’m afraid the downsized copy of myself I loaded into your ship’s computer wasn’t sophisticated enough to make allowances for caste. I apologize on her behalf.

  Kyoto didn’t know what to say. She was more disturbed by Memory’s apology than if the AI had accused her of murdering the Mutants. It was chilling to listen to Memory speak about the Manti caste so ruthlessly.

  “Uh, sure. No problem.” Kyoto decided this might be a good time to change the subject. “Your junior version had a theory about why so few Mutants remained on Rhea, but she, ah, never got the chance to tell me.”

  “Oh, that. The personnel at Influx tried to protect Rhea from the Manti by shifting the entire moon into hyperspace. It was a bold plan, but unfortunately, they didn’t know that hyperspace was the Manti’s home, and by coming here they actually accelerated the Rheans’ absorption.”

  Kyoto didn’t like Memory’s tone. Not only didn’t the AI sound bothered by what had happened to Rhea’s Colonists, she actually sounded amused by the irony of their demise.

  “Once the majority of Colonists became Mutants, they departed Rhea. Only a small number of the Influx techs remained behind, attracted by the residual hyperetheric radiation in the Infuser.”

  Kyoto remembered how the Mutants had gathered around the metallic infinity sign. “And now Rhea itself has been destroyed.”

  “Perhaps,” Memory said casually, as if it didn’t matter to her either way.

  Was Memory becoming increasingly coldhearted—if such a term could be applied to an AI—the longer the Janus remained in hyperspace? It seemed that way to Kyoto, and she feared that the Manti biomaterial Memory had been joined to wasn’t finished changing her.

  The holoscreen showed only the unvarying sameness of hyperspace, the gray of the shadowpath they traveled, and the darkness of the mass shadows they navigated between. But in the distance, faint yellow illumination appeared. Kyoto and the others watched the amber glow became larger as they approached. Soon, they could see that the light was being generated by a large group of Brain Bugs—or Prana—clustered together so tightly they formed a sphere from their own bodies. It was hard to judge size and distance in hyperspace visually, but sensors indicated that the Prana sphere was the size of a small moon. The sphere had to be made up of hundreds of Brain Bugs, Kyoto thought, perhaps thousands.

  “The Daimonion, I presume,” Mudo said.

  “Not quite,” Memory replied. “The Daimonion is inside.”

  As their Prana escorts brought them closer to the sphere, a group of Brain Bugs drifted away from the cluster, leaving an opening precisely large enough for the Janus to fly through.

  Kyoto didn’t know what waited for them inside the Prana’s sphere, but whatever it was, she knew she wasn’t going to like it. But without control of the Janus’s engines or weapons, there was nothing she could do but sit and watch as the Prana towed them through the opening and into the sphere.

  Kyoto experienced a moment of disorientation similar to what she’d felt when she’d first begun zero-gee training at the Defender Academy. But it soon passed, and she found herself standing in a cramped storeroom that had been converted into sleeping quarters for seven children. In it were pillows, blankets, a few broken toys, and a single shared holopad with a blurry screen that made it hard to read the stories contained in its memory.

  Kyoto was hit by a sense of recognition so strong it was almost like a physical blow. She knew this place, knew every single detail down to the mingled body odor of seven children that lingered in the air. Though it was a ripe, sour smell, it still brought tears of sadness and joy to her eyes. This had been her room in the refugee camp on Rhea, where she’d lived with six other orphaned kids after her family had been killed. But this was impossible. Hadn’t Memory said there was a good chance Rhea had been destroyed when it passed through the maelstrom on its return to realspace? Besides, hadn’t she been on the Janus just a moment ago? She had no memory of landing, let alone disembarking.

  “What is this place?”

  Startled, Kyoto turned around to see she wasn’t alone. Dr. Mudo stood behind her, along with Hastimukah, who was still wearing Aspen DeFonesca’s form.

  “It appears to be living quarters of some sort,” Hastimukah said.

  Mudo grimaced and toed a naked headless doll with his boot. “If you can call this living.”

  “You see it, too… both of you,” Kyoto said.

  “Yes,” Hastimukah confirmed. “Though I am at a loss as to how we came to be here.”

  Mudo frowned. “I remember the Janus entering the Prana sphere, but after that…” His eyes widened in understanding. “This must be the Daimonion!”

  “How can it be?” Kyoto said. “It looks exactly like the refugee camp I lived in on Rhea.”

  “It’s a mental image of some sort,” Mudo said. “Like a psychic hologram. It seems the Prana can do quite a bit more with those oversize brains of theirs than simply contemplate how ugly they are. They’ve created some manner of mindscape for us to inhabit, using your memories, Kyoto.”

  “This is similar to what I did when we spoke in the aboretum in Cydonia,” Hastimukah said to Kyoto. “Though this simulation possesses a depth of reality behind even Residuum technology.”

  “Though there’s no way of telling at the moment, I believe that the Janus is inside the Prana sphere and our bodies are still inside the ship,” Mudo said. “The Daimonion isn’t a physical place, but rather a psychic plane created by the combined mindpower of the Prana.”

  “Very good, Doctor. Memory told us that you were quite intelligent, but we didn’t imagine you’d grasp the true nature of your surroundings so quickly. We are most impressed.”

  Standing in the open doorway of the converted storeroom was a figure that Kyoto thought she’d never see again. She ran past Mudo and Hastimukah and threw her arms around her dead father and sobbed.

  The man was Asian, with black hair and a kind face, and he wore a bomber jacket just like Kyoto’s over his flight suit. He let Kyoto cry for a moment before gently but firmly pushing her away. “You understand that we are not your loved one, any more than this place is what it appears to be.”

  The being Kyoto had embraced smiled gently, but she nevertheless drew back in disgust. She’d just hugged one of the Brain Bugs!

  “All of them, actually,” Memory said over Kyoto’s comlink. “In the Daimonion, they function as a single group intelligence.”

  Kyoto wasn’t surprised that Memory had somehow been privy to her thoughts. That was the least of her concerns at the moment.

  Sorrow and fury welled up inside her. “How dare you use my memories of my father like this!” Kyoto reached for her sidearm, but she wasn’t wearing one. Not that an imaginary blaster could do any real damage in an imaginary place anyway.”

  “You have our most sincere apologies, Commander,” the Prana said. “Your minds are alien to us, and we’re having a difficult time understanding what we find within your thoughts. They’re so… random, so chaotic. Always in motion but never seeming to lead anywhere.” The Prana spread his arms apologetically. “If we had known this image would cause you grief, we would not have selected it.”

  Kyoto wasn’t mollified by the Prana’s explanation. “Since when do the Manti care about causing pain? It’s one of the things you do best.”

  The Prana didn’t respond to her comment. Instead, she experienced another sensation of v
ertigo, and now they were all standing in a narrow corridor with plasteel walls, floor, and ceiling. Holographic light globes hung in the air above them, set to give off only scant illumination. The walls were lined with doors on both sides, each door featureless save for a DNA scan access panel in the middle.

  The figure before them no longer resembled Kyoto’s father, but instead a short, stout man with close-cropped black hair and—incredibly—glasses. The man was dressed in the gray uniform of a security guard, and the holster around his waist held a stun lance.

  Kyoto didn’t recognize either the man or the building, but Mudo did. The scientist took a step toward the uniformed man, then stopped.

  “You’re not my father, either,” he said, sounding as if he were speaking to himself rather than the Prana. “And this isn’t Phobos Prison.”

  So Mudo had grown up on Phobos, Kyoto thought, and as the son of a guard, no less.

  “Correct again, Doctor,” the Prana said. The figure gestured at their surroundings. “All of this is from your memories.”

  “I suppose I’ll be next,” Hastimukah said. “What will we see? The interior of a Residuum starship? Or will you dig deeper into my memories, going back to my childhood on Bergelmir, when my great-sire and I traveled from one shelter to another, trying to escape your kind?”

  Kyoto was taken aback by the bitterness in Hastimukah’s voice. She’d gotten so used to him being calm and reserved—almost like a kindly priest or a seasoned teacher—that she’d forgotten that the members of the Residuum had reason to hate the Manti just as much as humans did.

  “No,” the Prana said. “The nanotechnology in your body prevents us from easily delving into your thoughts. We could nullify this technology, of course, but that would result in severe brain damage to you, so we thought it best to simply allow you to share the mindscape generated by your companions’ memories.”

  Hastimukah paled. “I appreciate your restraint.”

  The Prana inclined its head, acknowledging Hastimukah’s gratitude. “But shifting between two mindscapes can be distracting, even for us, so let us see what can be done about the situation.”