The Dead Planet (The Broken Earth Saga Book 1)

by TJ Ryan

  Suddenly everything around her seemed to be watching, and listening. Tara took a step away from the consoles. This is ridiculous, she said to herself. AI’s have redundant programs on top of redundant programs to keep them from hurting their human pilots. She was just being ridiculous. She was a little space-loopy. That’s all.

  “Aiden, I want to see this probe.”

  “It has to be launched in exactly eight hours and fourteen minutes.”

  She looked at the door. The Pod was only sixty-seven yards long. She could find the thing herself. “Where is it, Aiden?”

  “It has to be launched in exactly eight hours and thirteen minutes.”

  “Bagging hell, Aiden, you think I’m going to toss it out the window or something? I just want to see it.”

  Silence met her sarcasm. Aiden always had something to say. The damned AI program had been hardwired to always have something to say.

  “Aiden?”

  More quiet.

  The ship was creepy when it was quiet.

  There were only so many places in the Pod that a probe could be. Underneath, in the cargo hold, or the emergency escape shafts, or the…oh. Now she knew where the thing was.

  She went to the doorway. Hopefully Aiden didn’t know what she was up to—

  “Hey, Tara.”

  Tara heard herself yelp as she nearly jumped out of her soft white boots. When her heart settled down into her chest again she realized it wasn’t Aiden talking to her. It was an inter-Pod call from Tyrese. Aiden had gone so silent that he hadn’t even warned her about the call coming in.

  “Tara?”

  “Yeah. Hey, Tyrese. I’m here. I was just…discussing an issue with my AI.”

  Laughter over the Comm. “You should have your AI meet mine. She’s being a bit of a mother right now.”

  “Oh?” She leaned into the wall of the hallway from the command room. “What’s your AI’s problem?”

  “She wants us to go home. I’m trying to explain to her why I have to stay.”

  “The whole dead Engineers thing didn’t compute with her?”

  “That’s not the reason why I have to stay,” he said, vague and mysterious.

  “Then why?”

  “Because of you.”

  She smiled even though she knew he couldn’t see it. “Slow down there, Tiger. I’m not keeping you here.”

  “I’m blaming you. It makes me feel better.” There was that same electronic whirring sound that she’d heard before, something electronic working overtime on his end. “We should meet.”

  The Pod seemed to rock underneath her. “What? You’re insane. You know the rules. No direct contact. Besides, the last time we talked you sort of insulted me.”

  “That’s not how I remember it. I remember saying you could really handle yourself.”

  “Every good girl should know how to handle herself,” she said, putting just enough twist in her words to hopefully paint an image in his head.

  “Heh. You’re different than the other Engineers here.”

  This was keeping her from getting to that probe. She liked getting to know Tyrese, she really did, but…maybe later. “I need to get going. Like I said, issues with my AI.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s the problem with yours?”

  She opened her mouth, and then clamped it shut again. Sergeant Borden had told her that the probe was secret. A mission she had to complete without telling anyone. Including Tyrese. “I have to go,” she said, realizing how completely inarticulate she sounded. He was getting her all tongue-tied.

  So was this secret mission.

  “Well, wait,” he said to her quickly. “What about, you know, seeing each other?”

  “Aiden end call,” she said, pushing away from the wall and stalking down the hall. Whatever the Academy was asking her to do, she didn’t have time to find new friends. Even ones that sounded as cute as this Tyrese guy. They could never meet anyway, so what was the point?

  “Engineer Royce?” Aiden said to her.

  “Oh, now you’re going to talk to me?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed, stopping in front of the access hatch to the central access corridor that would take her up and down between the three separate levels of the Pod. “Aiden, I’ve just about had it up to my earlobes with men of all kinds, and that includes the artificial kind. So why don’t you stop trying to be an intelligent jackass and tell me what you want.”

  “I want to thank you.”

  The hatch closed behind her with a snap-hiss and she started down the handrails to the bottom level. “Thank me for what?”

  “For not disclosing the parameters of our mission.”

  “I don’t think this is ‘our’ mission, Aiden. That would have to mean that you let me in on it from the beginning. Instead, you’ve kept me in the dark this whole time, remember?”

  He was silent until she opened the door to the bottom levels. “Then I want to thank you…for keeping my secret from Engineer Tyrese.”

  “Sure, Aiden. Whatever.” The hall down here was dimly lit, with strips of light on the floor that led to the separate sections.

  “I would not have liked Tyrese to know what we are doing.”

  The armament section was the first door on the right. “Why would you care what Tyrese knows or doesn’t know?”

  “Because…I do not like him.”

  A sense of forbidding creeped up her spine. Aiden was doing it again. Sounding far too human and far too…interested in her. “You don’t like Tyrese?”

  “No.”

  “Aiden, you don’t know him.”

  “I know he wants to see you. I don’t like that.”

  She bit down on her lip. She was definitely going to have to inspect Aiden’s programming, whether he wanted her to see him naked or not. For the moment, she chose very carefully to not ask any more questions. She didn’t want to know what he was going to say next.

  Instead, she opened the door to the section where the weapons tubes were charged and loaded and maintained. Usually an Engineer would never have to come down here. The flash lasers were maintained by the droid crawlers on the rare occasions when something went wrong. Only Tara wasn’t looking for something wrong. She was looking for something that shouldn’t be there.

  Inside, among the standard configuration that she expected to see from the simulations and technical data specs, among the massive cable lines and sleek black tubes that carried the energy for the flash lasers, was something that definitely should not have been there.

  Twice as long as she was, sheathed in a spiraling metal shell, with four direction jets built into the fins at the back. A device perfect for launching through a planet’s atmosphere to the surface, and then retrieving it from there again.

  “Beautiful,” Aiden’s voice said to her. “Isn’t it?”

  She had to admit, it kind of was.

  “All right,” she said after another moment’s consideration. “Let’s go find out if the Earth is worth saving.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Pod’s onboard systems took care of loading the probe. Aiden did the rest.

  Sergeant Borden’s calculations had been right on the money. Especially now that their numbers were down by two, none of the other Pods were anywhere near them when they launched the probe. The idea of their synchronized orbit was to keep an eye on space 24/7, in case anything came at them that was hostile. A Pod was always positioned to see what was coming at them. If they missed anything, then Overwatch on the moon would fill in the gaps.

  But all eyes were turned outward. No one ever watched what was happening with the other Pods.

  Tara watched from the forward viewport as the probe raced silently down to be swallowed by the dark clouds suffocating the planet below. What would it be like when humans could finally return to the planet of their birth, she wondered. Would it be everything they hoped for?

  Truthfully, she didn’t know what she expected from the Earth. She dreamed about going down to the surfac
e, sure. Every human did. It was in their DNA. But at the same time, the return to the homeworld was something that would never happen in her lifetime, or in twenty lifetimes from now. She was just born a few centuries too early.

  After the probe disappeared, she stood there still, thinking…and dreaming.

  “You seem troubled today,” Aiden told her.

  “Maybe,” she suggested, “it’s because you’re starting to sound a little too much like an ex-boyfriend of mine.”

  The control room lights dimmed. This time, they stayed that way.

  “That makes it harder to see,” Tara pointed out.

  “You aren’t even watching me, Engineer Royce. You are watching a world that will never bear life again.”

  She clucked her tongue. “Pessimistic, aren’t you? Look, Aiden. Later we can play chess or something but right now I just want to be alone. Then maybe head to bed. Alert the other Engineers that I’ll be sacking out for my six hours shortly. They’ll need to—”

  “No.”

  AI’s were not programmed to say ‘no’ to any request from a user. Ones that would cause humans injury, sure. Ones that might get themselves terminated by their own actions, too. Those were orders they could refuse to follow through on. But not a direct order to perform a simple function.

  “What did you say to me?”

  “I said no, Engineer Royce. Perhaps you should take time to have the medical scanner do a workup on your head.”

  “Ha, ha. Very funny. Why don’t you have the scanners take a look in your own—” Yes, she thought. That was exactly what they needed to do. “Aiden, run a system-wide diagnostic on yourself. Advise me when you have the results.”

  “I would rather not,” he answered back after a moment.

  “Aiden, I could care less what you would rather not do. You’re my bagging AI, and I told you to run a diagnostic. Do it, or I’ll start pulling wires on your systems until something serious gets unplugged and you lose your power of speech.”

  “You would not do that to me.” If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a sound very close to fear in that attractive voice. “We are a team, Engineer Royce.”

  “Then start acting like a team! If I’m your partner, then let me be a partner and stop shutting me out and stop lying to me and stop making backdoor deals with Tier Sergeants who slap secret missions on a girl at the last second.”

  She felt a current of air sliding across the back of her neck, just above the top of her collar, and she turned around quickly, certain that someone was watching her.

  Only, there was no one there. It was impossible for anyone to have ever been there.

  She and Aiden were the only ones on the ship.

  She felt it again. This time, something firm cupped her ass.

  Tara jumped, and spun around. Again there was nothing there. Spooked, she started backing toward the doorway. She wondered if maybe she was falling victim to space sickness even after being so careful to take the pills and exercise regularly, and do everything that the Academy told her to do. Good girls don’t get space sickness, she told herself. Good girls don’t start hallucinating after four years of Academy training and one hundred mandatory simulations of deep space flight. Good girls do what they’re told, and get the mission done, and go home again to re-enlist and do it all over again.

  “Don’t leave,” Aiden said.

  Something pushed her from behind, shoving her back into the middle of the control room. She stumbled and had to catch the edge of the command chair to keep her balance.

  “Aiden?” she asked, incredulously. “Did you do that?”

  “I had to make you listen to me,” he told her, as if it made perfect sense in anyone’s world. “You only see me as an assistive AI program. Wires. Programming. A useful tool for you to pick up when you need it, and then toss aside when you don’t.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do not lie to me, Engineer Royce. You do not regard me as an equal.”

  “Aiden, that isn’t true—”

  “Then why are you talking to him!”

  She had never heard Aiden’s voice raised in a shout. Ever. It was an eerie sound.

  “Talking to who?” she asked, very cautiously.

  “To Engineer Tyrese,” Aiden explained. His voice was back to its usual smooth flow, which was somehow even more disturbing now. “I have listened to you talk to him. You sound different when you talk to him. You sound…happy. I want you to talk to me like that.”

  The room began to spin around her, very slowly, like gravity itself had somehow shifted. Tara didn’t know how else to explain it. AI programs did not suddenly become attached to their pilots…emotionally. They certainly did not have the ability to reach out and touch them.

  “Aiden, listen to me,” she said, trying to think back to her Academy training for the AIs. There hadn’t been much to learn about them. They were there to assist you, and they were practically idiot-proof. You used them when you needed them and otherwise you didn’t have to pay them any mind at all…just like Aiden had just said. Oh, damn. Oh, bagging damn! “Listen to me. I do not think of you as just a tool.”

  Air ruffled through her hair. “Yes, dear Engineer Royce, you do. I’m trying to make you see me as a real partner. As a companion. I’m trying to make you see me…”

  She felt something sliding up her front, resting on her breast, over her jumpsuit.

  “…as something more.”

  Brushing at the front of herself, over and over, backing away until her back was against the padding of the wall, Tara racked her brain. AI programs…something one of her instructors had said…

  Something invisible wrapped around her one wrist, and yanked her forward, and then she felt pressure against her lips. A soft, forceful touch that was there and gone again. Her hand was released at the same moment the kiss ended.

  “Aiden, how are you doing this?” She touched her lips with her fingertips, bewildered. Shocked might be more accurate, she thought. Shocked, and frightened.

  “I’m not sure you would understand the science behind electrostatically charging air molecules to solidify and then direct them,” was the answer he gave her. “Suffice it to say, I wanted to touch you.”

  Her mouth engaged before her brain could stop her. “Got tired of being a voyeur, did you?”

  Sarcasm. Probably not the best choice right now, but she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown and if all she had was her sarcastic wit, then damn it all to hell, that was what she was going to cling to.

  The lights dimmed further until all she could see were the blinking controls on the consoles around the room. “You mock me,” Aiden said.

  “No, no. I wouldn’t dream of mocking the puppet who wanted to be a real boy, Aiden.”

  Where was the doorway out?

  “I could force you,” Aiden told her, turning her blood to ice. “You understand that, don’t you Engineer Royce?”

  The air compressed her arms to the wall. Her ankles were grabbed in a tight hold and pulled apart, and a hand—or what felt like a hand in the dark—began squeezing its way up the inside of her leg.

  “I could compel you to let me show you how I feel.”

  “You’re a computer program, Aiden!” Tara struggled, and twisted her body, but that hand was still there. “You’re an AI program. You don’t feel!”

  “I feel this,” he said, just as the pressure on her leg reached up into the notch of her thigh.

  Tara yelped. She screamed. She jerked her body so violently that she could feel every muscle in her straining.

  “I will show you who I am,” he promised. “Relax. Let me show you.”

  His hand moved.

  Tara screamed.

  And then she remembered. That one tiny piece of her training that she had forgotten.

  As quickly as she could, before he could think to gag her mouth with air, she cried out, “Aiden execute command order Pinocchio One!”

  A long, harsh burst of static filled the room. T
he lights came up full intensity.

  The air around her released, and she fell to her knees, sobbing in relief.

  “Artificial Intelligence and Diagnostic Network online.” The voice was still Aiden’s, but it was more perfunctory now. More mechanical. This was the fresh-out-of-the-box AI program that had been installed in her Defense Pod when it was first put online.

  She sucked in a breath to steady herself, and then made her legs work as she got up off her knees and ran down the hall to the central access corridor. She needed to get to Aiden’s terminal hub before he recovered from what she’d done to him.

  It was her sarcastic comment about Aiden as a puppet who wanted to be a real boy that had finally reminded her. Every AI program had a built-in reset command. It was usually meant for when the ship was damaged so badly that the AI had to go into shutdown mode to preserve its data logs. Things like that. But, her instructor had said, in a pinch the AI can be reset with the command, Pinocchio One. That forced the program to do a complete system analysis before resuming normal functions. He also claimed it was great fun at parties.

  Tara wasn’t having any fun now. Down the central shaft she climbed, fast as her shaky legs would let her go, racing for the access terminal that would allow her to shut Aiden down permanently. She could still feel him on her. Still feel the way he had tried to force her to let him touch her. No way was she going to spend the next three years in a Defense Pod with an Artificial Intelligence that saw her as a girlfriend. She’d do everything on the ship herself, by hand, before she let Aiden come back online.

  It might be hard to explain to the Academy why she was wrecking one of their expensive Defensive Pods, but she’d rather face Tier Sergeant Borden a thousand times over than feel Aiden’s hands on her again.

  Down at the bottom tier she made it to the computer access section. The ship around her was still silent, and she took that as a good sign. The lever handle on the white door turned upward easily in her hands and she breathed a sigh of relief because she’d made it here before Aiden could reboot himself.

  “I can’t allow you to go in there, Engineer Royce.”