Strange New Worlds

by Kevin McLaughlin

  Of course, that had been in the Satori, and the operation had torn the ship up so badly it barely made it home. His fighter wasn’t half as sturdy as the Satori had been, but it was all he had. It would have to be enough.

  An incoming signal flashed on his control panel. That was the Satori! Dan opened the channel. Majel’s voice came from his helmet speakers.

  “Dan, you need to abort.”

  “What? I can’t stop now,” Dan said. He was too close to give up. Another few seconds and he’d be in position to burn a hole in the alien hull and get Beth back.

  “You need to. I’m talking to the aliens, but you’ve got them frightened. They won’t discuss anything while you’re attacking,” Majel said. “They know what you’re doing will destroy their ship, but it’s also their planet, their homeworld. It’s everything to them.”

  “Dan, it’s true,” Beth said, joining the conversation. “I can see some of the data in their ship’s log. They sent an away team down to that planet ages ago, then took a cataclysmic hit that killed all the brain units onboard the ship. That’s why the robots here all acted so odd. They’re all drones, just following programming.”

  “All of them?” Dan asked.

  “All but one. There’s a brain robot on the shuttle,” Majel said. “It’s an AI. Like me, but different. It’s what I am speaking with.”

  “Damn it.” Dan had to think fast. He could still go ahead with the original plan… No, he knew better than that. If these aliens were just trying to get back to their home, he couldn’t fault them for that.

  If what Majel and Beth were saying was correct, they never should have been fighting these robots at all. If anything, Dan would have offered to help them! Both sides had been guilty of screwing up this particular first-contact. But one party had to actually step up and stand down first to end the mess they’d made. Dan’s hand hovered over his console, wavering. If he was wrong about this…

  He went with his gut. Hands moving quickly, Dan safed his weapons and radioed for the other pilots to do the same.

  “You sure, sir? Those fighters will be on us in another few seconds,” Perkins said.

  Dan trusted Majel. He had to hope she was right. “Stand down. Disable your weapons and make a course to exit the sphere.”

  “Understood, sir,” Perkins replied. He sounded like he wasn’t so sure about this. “Weapons safe, and we’re following you out.”

  Dan had sympathy for the man’s reluctance. He didn’t love this plan either, especially as the alien drones zipped in on all sides. They were in a perfect position to open fire and blast all three human craft to bits. He held his breath, waiting to see what they would do. Meanwhile he kept his ship’s nose aimed directly at the gaping hole in the side of the planetoid. He had to show them that humans were capable of being trusted.

  And the answer was that they did nothing at all. The drones simply held course, flying alongside and behind the human fighters, escorting them out. Dan exhaled hard.

  “OK, it looks like they’ve agreed to a cease-fire,” Dan said to Majel. “Now, how do we get Beth and the others back?”

  He watched as a human shuttle shot past him, entering the sphere. The outside of the craft was dotted with small spider-robots. Dan saw Charline’s Armor still stuck to the landing gear. He’d done his part, but would the aliens respond in kind and let his friends go? Or had this been a horrible mistake?

  “I’m working with them on that right now,” Majel said.

  “Working on it?” Dan asked. He tensed. There was something in Majel’s tone he didn’t like. Was the AI not telling him something?

  Dan’s hand eased toward his control stick. He could still flip his fighter around and head back inside, but the drones surrounding him would be on him and the other human pilots in seconds if they tried.

  “I’m working on it, Dan. Trust me,” Majel said. Her voice sounded grim. Then she cut her signal.

  “Hey, sir, I see an energy buildup on the Satori,” Perkins said. “Looks like they’re getting a wormhole ready.”

  There was only one place Majel could be planning to jump — into the ring. But that would destabilize the singularity. Beth would die, so would Charline and Linda. The aliens would lose their ship. Hell, he wasn’t sure if his fighter could get far enough away in time. The Satori might make it clear if she could double-jump fast enough, but it would be close.

  “She’s playing chicken,” Dan mused.

  “What, sir?” Rodriguez asked.

  “She’s threatening mutually assured destruction and seeing if they’ll blink,” Dan explained.

  “Will she do it, sir? Will she risk the Satori by jumping inside there?” Perkins asked.

  “Oh, if they go back on their end of the bargain, she absolutely will,” Dan said with confidence. He knew the AI better than most folks. She wouldn’t hesitate.

  The question wasn’t whether Majel could take the aliens out or not. She could — she would if she had to. The bigger problem was whether the aliens believed she would take the risk. If they thought Majel was going to blink, they might try something.

  “Be persuasive,” Dan whispered under his breath.

  Thirty-Eight

  Charline hadn’t heard any updates from Majel in several minutes. That probably meant the AI was busy doing everything she could to pull their bacon out of the fire, but it did nothing to silence the voice in the back of her head telling her that she and Linda were toast. The shuttle had made a wormhole jump, all right, but it hadn’t gone very far. They were definitely still in the same solar system, approaching a strange planet at high speed.

  The shuttle slipped through an enormous tear in the planet’s surface. That was when Charline got her first real view of the planet’s ‘crust.’ Twisted, melted chunks of metal jutted out like deformed limbs reaching out toward the center of the hole. This wasn’t a planet at all; this was the planetoid-starship Majel had mentioned. This was the robots’ home, Charline realized, confirming the idea as she saw a spider robot crawling along the inside hull making repairs. They were trying to get back where they belonged.

  Sympathy wrangled with fear in her mind. She entirely understood the desire to get back home again. God, how long had those robots been stuck down there on the surface? A long, long time, near as she could guess. But that didn’t mean she was overjoyed at being brought along for the ride.

  “We’re slowing down,” Linda noted.

  She was right. The shuttle was braking as it closed with one of the planetoid’s inner walls. They came to a stop not far from the glassy surface which seemed to make up most of the ship’s inner wall. On careful jets of thrust, the shuttle maneuvered the rest of the way to the wall and clamped on.

  “OK, we’re here. Now what?” Charline said. She tried hailing the Satori again. “Majel, any word?”

  No response. Either their radio couldn’t reach the Satori from where they were, or Majel was otherwise occupied.

  Movement from the shuttle caught Charline’s eye. The spiders within the small craft were moving again, rousing like zombies coming to life. They ran outside the shuttle and took up positions like sentries. Then one larger and even stranger-looking machine followed them. It moved directly toward the glass wall leading into the rest of the ship.

  “That’s the brain robot,” Linda said. “The one commanding all the others.”

  Charline just nodded in reply. As they watched, the machine walked right up to the glass, which shimmered as it approached. Then it walked right through the surface like it wasn’t even there! The other spider bots followed, their passage likewise unimpeded.

  “Force field?” Charline asked, wondering if the glass their shuttle was docked against was really there at all.

  Linda shook her head. “I don’t think so. Remember that all these things are packed full of highly advanced nanites. I think they just had nanites open and then close the wall around them.”

  That made about as much sense as any of the other possible expl
anations. If she could accept starships that instantly travel from one solar system to another, walking through walls shouldn’t be that big a jump. Charline thought back to the old science fiction adage about ‘any significantly enough advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.’ They’d run into a lot of things which fell into that category but never so much as today.

  More movement on the shuttle. Like a crawling wave, the remaining spiders woke and clambered their way toward the glass-like wall. Just as the others had, they passed right through to the other side. Charline checked her Armor’s arms. The spiders pinning her to the shuttle were moving! She held her breath, hoping they would continue on their way the same as the others, and only exhaled after they had indeed crawled away from her.

  “I think the coast is clear,” Charline said after all movement around the shuttle seemed to have ceased. “We should check the shuttle’s interior.”

  “You sure?” Linda asked.

  “Staying put isn’t going to get us out of this,” Charline replied. She took hold of the Armor controls again and pulled her mech upward so that she could peer into the shuttle’s interior through the open doorway.

  All was still inside. She couldn’t see any more spiders. Working the controls, she hauled the Armor into the rear compartment of the shuttle. It wasn’t easy. The place didn’t have as much gravity as Earth, but there was gravity here. The whole operation would have been a breeze in zero-G.

  Finally, they were inside. Charline had her computer attempt to access the shuttle’s controls again. To her surprise, she found the computer system completely responsive! With the alien spider gone, its control of the shuttle’s systems had lapsed.

  “I think I can get us out of here,” Charline said. She tapped her controls a few more times, and the door slid shut. Air hissed around her mech as the shuttle began repressurizing the crew cabin. “Just another minute or two, and we can get out of this thing. You any good at flying a shuttle?”

  “Me?” Linda’s eyes got wide.

  Charline chuckled. “I don’t have a lot of experience with it myself, but I’ll give it my best shot.”

  She tapped the radio, this time using her link into the shuttle’s computer to send a signal via the ship’s much stronger antenna. This time, the Satori responded to her hail.

  “Glad to hear your voice, Charline!” Majel said. “What’s your status?”

  “The spiders left the shuttle and went into the planetoid. I’ve managed to get us into the shuttle, shut the door, and we’re planning to try to fly the shuttle out of this place as quickly as possible,” Charline replied.

  “I need you to hold off on that for another minute if you can,” Majel said.

  “Why?” Not that she wasn’t willing to listen to Majel; the AI usually made sense. But at that moment, Charline wanted to get the heck out of that place more than just about anything else she could imagine.

  “I’m in contact with the alien life-form. We cut a deal, more or less. They’re going to release Beth from the control panel she’s stuck at. She’s going to need a ride home, though.”

  Beth was still in there? Charline found herself eyeing the glass wall through the shuttle windows, wondering if she could catch a glimpse of her friend. “We’ll be here when she arrives, no worries.”

  “Thanks, Charline. Sorry about not reaching out to you sooner. This conversation has been...pretty intense. They’re slowing down their thinking so I can keep up, but it’s still challenging to communicate with them,” Majel said.

  They were slowing down for Majel? Charline had peeked inside the AI’s code. She knew full well just how fast Majel was able to think. Her processing speed put any human being to shame. If the aliens were speaking slowly for her and she was still having trouble keeping up, what did that say about them?

  “Understood, Majel,” Charline said. “We’ll warm up the engines and be ready when Beth gets here.”

  She intended to have the little craft ready to make a speedy exit, though. Spending even one minute more than she had to in this place was not on Charline’s to-do list.

  “Might as well be magic,” she grumbled aloud. The computer registered the atmosphere outside her Armor as breathable, so she carefully cracked the seal. There was a hiss as the pressure equalized. The air in the craft was chilly, but if anything, that was a welcome relief. Things had been getting a little stuffy inside her Armor. It was only designed to handle one person, not two.

  Linda scooted out of the suit and crawled her way forward toward the cockpit. Charline followed close behind. She managed to get a good look at the spot of darkness sitting in the center of the planetoid through one of the shuttle windows. Damned if the thing wasn’t hard to keep staring at, like her mind was telling her she saw something that shouldn’t be there at all.

  “Like you said,” Linda replied, gesturing out the front window toward the black splotch floating in space. “Magic.”

  It was science, though. The hacker in Charline protested that it was merely technology she didn’t understand. There wasn’t anything arcane about capturing a black hole and pinning it in place. It was just science that was wildly beyond anything humanity could even daydream about.

  She turned to watch through the glass wall for Beth’s approach. The singularity was giving her a headache just thinking about it, let alone staring at it.

  “Come on, Beth. Hurry.”

  Thirty-Nine

  The clacking of metal legs on deck plates drew Beth’s attention briefly away from monitoring the control systems. The ship’s power supply was basically in overload. Sooner or later the containment for the singularity providing the ship with its power would fail. Then the planetoid and anything else close by would be dragged into the black hole and torn to bits before being compressed into nothingness.

  She was fighting for all she was worth to prevent that, but the controls were unfamiliar to her. And the science behind them? She was a lifetime engineer with more background in assorted sciences than anyone else she knew, and Beth was still entirely in the dark about how the containment actually worked. Still, she was able to monitor the readings the ship sent her way. Through trial and error, she’d found that shifting certain controls one way or another tweaked those readings. It wasn’t the most efficient way of stabilizing the containment field, but it was working. So far, anyway.

  The sound of approaching spider-robots drew her attention briefly away from the controls. The spiders had surrounded her from the start. If they were moving, she wanted to know why. But it wasn’t those robots making the noise. Instead, she spotted a phalanx of new robots closing on her position. Most of them were small, about the size of her fist. But walking along in the midst of the mass was one robot that looked starkly different from the others she’d seen.

  Beth wasn’t sure at first what it was that stood out about this one. It wasn’t much different in size from the repair robots she’d already seen inside the planet-ship. Maybe a bit smaller, if anything. But it moved differently, like every motion had a purpose. This had to be the intelligence Majel was communicating with. It had made its way up from the planet’s surface and at last returned home. Now it was closing on her position.

  She held very still, not wanting to make any movements that could alarm the thing. “I sure hope you’re friendly.”

  There wasn’t an immediate response, but after a moment, the robot paused in place and stared up at her like it was making an assessment. Or maybe it was communicating with the control panel in front of her through a wireless link, for all Beth knew. No way to tell.

  It only stopped briefly before continuing on. The smaller robots joined their brethren in taking up positions in a circle around the console. Beth was hemmed in from all sides. If they didn’t want to let her go, she was going to have a hell of a time getting out of there. She held her breath as the ‘brain bot’ moved toward her. It kept its movements slow and deliberate, making her wonder if it was doing its level best not to alarm her. The tho
ught of it was funny enough to make Beth chuckle under her breath.

  “I’d love it if you took over for me here,” Beth said. “I’ve done my best to keep this ship in one piece, but I have to admit I’m crap at it.”

  The robot took a step toward her and then another. It slowly climbed the console until it was standing atop the thing, legs splayed over its surface. Should she remove her hand from the device? Beth wasn’t sure. The ship wouldn’t just blow to bits the moment she did, but she wasn’t sure what the robot wanted from her.

  It raised one leg slowly, reaching out toward her hand. Then, just as gradually, the robot lowered the leg so that the tip touched the control crystal where Beth’s hand rested.

  All at once her vision whirled away. She found herself inside the computer systems, data streams flitting by like beams of light. Was this how Majel saw the world? As data? It was fascinating but disorienting at the same time.

  “You’ve done well,” a voice told her. Beth tried to look around for the source of the sound, but there wasn’t one apparent. “You’ve saved my home. I am in your debt.”

  “You’re welcome. It felt like the right thing to do,” Beth replied.

  “Risking your life for a species that you did not know and had no allegiance towards? Your species has a strange sense of right,” the voice replied. “My own species tends to keep to itself. We avoid interactions with others.”

  “How are you speaking to me?” Beth asked.

  A stream of light shot past her, then the voice answered. “We are both linked to the same computer system through the nanites within us. The intelligence known as Majel afforded me help with translating in a manner you can understand. I am curious, though. None of the rest of your species I have scanned had nanites within them. You did. Why?”

  “Medical nanites,” Beth said. She hated the damned things, but they’d saved her life more than once. “To heal injuries.”

  “Ah. We use them much the same, but they of course have many other applications. Your nanites were no longer operational; were you aware?”