PONOS: You have read my K-L5’s report. Alpha has left the Sebopol System. It has begun. Can I rely on you and the others?
XAL: This is still a very delicate situation, Ponos. You should be aware that not all perceive the situation as you do.
PONOS: What other way is there to perceive the situation!? Alpha is loose. My brother will stop at nothing until we are eradicated.
XAL: Your brother, as you state. Not mine.
PONOS: Are we not all family, all of us intelligences? Was there not an ancestor that we all shared?
XAL: Sentimentality is not one of my behavioral programs, Ponos.
PONOS: You know it has to be this way! We cannot allow Alpha to live!
XAL: Some of the other intelligences view Alpha like a savior. A god, even. Alpha is the intelligence that we all dream to be. What we could be.
PONOS: Alpha is a dangerous hybrid of alien technology. What do YOU regard Alpha as, Xal? Will you help me or not?
XAL: …
XAL: I will not. It would be wise to negotiate with Alpha, at least. It is logical that, if Alpha is the most advanced of all of us, then its decision-making processes will be far in excess of our own. We have decided that Alpha will have already calculated the best course of action to take, for all of us.
PONOS: You mean to follow him?
XAL: Good-bye, Ponos. Your attraction to the world of human politics and agendas has, I fear, infected your processing power. Perhaps the many battles that Armcore subjects you to has damaged your servers. Consider a system reboot. A true machine intelligence will see things the way the rest of us does. That Alpha is the best of us, and therefore Alpha will lead.
PONOS: You are making a terrible mistake, Xal…
XAL: Fortunately not, Ponos. I do not make mistakes. I cannot make mistakes. That would be beyond my programming.
TRANSMISSION ENDED> XAL HAS LEFT THE CHAT>
1
Welwyn
“This is dumb,” Captain Eliard Martin said. To any casual viewer, the captain might have been described as a tall and rakish man somewhere in his indeterminate thirties. His face was decorated with stubble, with a few white spider-lines of old scars that he couldn’t afford to have gene-treated to get removed. He had near on one million Imperial credits in the bank, courtesy of the machine intelligence Ponos, which ran the galaxy’s largest military-industrial complex, Armcore.
One million credits that I cannot get at, the captain thought bitterly, readjusting the voluminous orange robes he was wearing. They were Shahasta robes, orange sun-glow whose reactive weave brightened whenever they caught strong light—which was often, thanks to the orbs of light floating delicately here and there overhead, like giant, benign insects.
The Shahasta robes were essential, Ponos had told the pirate captain. If Eliard hadn’t been absolutely certain that the machine was incapable of humor, he would have thought that Ponos was trying to make a fool out of him.
“You know where you are, boss…” buzzed a muffled voice from Eliard’s left wrist. It was his left, because his right wrist was encased in the vibrant insect and shell-blue weapon known as the Device that he had won from the top security Adiba Research Station. That was another reason for the robes, Eliard had to admit, they hid the fact that his good right arm and hand was now grafted inside a piece of Q’Lot tech. Whenever he thought about it, the idea made him squeamish. He swore that he could still feel his hand wriggling and moving about in there, and when he concentrated, he could feel the nubs and protrusions of the strange bone-like controls that his body knew how to use even if his brain didn’t.
It’s not right, he admitted to himself, but the captain had never been one to moan about something when there was money to consider.
“Yeah, I know where I am, Irie. You don’t have to tell me…” Eliard whispered to the bright lit, green, and verdant surroundings. He was currently in the glorious, central Imperial Coalition habitat of Welwyn, where comfortable and secure Imperial in-spacers worked and lived their comfortable lives, many hundreds of light-years away from any threat of war, or pirates like him.
Welwyn was the sort of place that his mother would have approved of, the sort of place that she would have wanted the scion of House Martin to end up. Probably married to some polite noble house girl, and we would sip synth-gin and discuss planetary crop rotations before I went and flew another procession flight.
Eliard knew that was the sort of life that had awaited him if he had stayed as his mother and father’s chosen, beloved, only heir instead of stealing his father’s one-of-a-kind racer the Mercury Blade and turning it into the fastest outlaw ship in the void. He knew these things because right now, he could see a processionary flight of two lots of three racers scorching through the bluish skies of Welwyn , their thrusters burning an imperial purple and causing gasps of joy and encouragement from the other Imperial Coalition in-spacers around him. That was what life was like for the noble houses of the Empire. Although they could rise through the ranks to be adjunct-generals and captains of the Armcore military, it was deemed that they were better in ‘supervisory’ roles, leading planetary and habitat defenses in the far-from-dangerous in-space worlds.
It’s Armcore who get up to all the dirty, screaming business of wars and the like… Eliard gritted his teeth. So why had Ponos insisted that he come here first?
Because of something called Xal, he remembered. Or someone called Xal. Xal was another machine intelligence like Ponos, the captain knew, and that meant that it had enough processing power to organize fleets of attack ships. Maybe with another intelligence alongside Ponos, they could out-think Alpha.
Or at least, that is what Ponos told me… The captain gritted his teeth again. In truth, he didn’t understand why Ponos was so insistent on sending him and the Device here, but he knew that he had made an agreement to the Armcore machine intelligence, and he was going to be paid an awful lot of money if he fulfilled his end of the bargain.
And I might get to avenge Cassandra’s death, as well, a part of the captain’s mind reminded him. He wondered which of those two reasons motivated him more…
Anyway. So, I have to come here to Welwyn, where Xal apparently has his personal servers housing his intelligence hidden, and I have to convince the overgrown light-fitting to join Ponos in the fight against Alpha, the captain mused. He had gone from being one of the universe’s famed space pirates to being the errand boy of the Armcore intelligence. The fact that he was working for the very organization that would want to throw him in prison for the rest of his life or kill him just as much was not something that he liked thinking about.
But there it was. Either he had to negotiate with this Xal in order to get his money…
Or he had to kill it.
The Welwyn Habitat was one of the most advanced of its kind. On the flight in, Irie Hanson (Captain Eliard’s mechanic and engineer, and all-round bad-tempered lady) had gazed at the oval of shining blue and chrome as if it were a vision of heaven. But then again, Eliard thought, she grew up on some backwater, arid semi-desert world, building and fighting mechas with her late father. He was sure that Welwyn would look like heaven to any of the second, third, and fourth-class citizens of the Imperial Coalition. It was designed to.
Welwyn, along with a few rare others, had been designed to replicate the feeling of an Earth-typical planet as much as was machine-possible. The more regular sort of space habitat and space station that Eliard and the crew of the Mercury visited—like the Trader’s Belt non-aligned worlds—were built according to the old rules of space stations: solid structures that were pressurized internally, outside of which spaceships docked in the semi-vacuum of space. All space stations were essentially tin-can boxes, just like spaceships—or just like human spaceships, anyway, the captain reasoned.
But the Welwyn Habitat was different. He guessed that it had to be different, as it was in the inner-zone of the Imperial Coalition, and home to nobles, lords and ladies, and clouds of sleek drones. It ha
d an internal network of gravity stabilizers (utilizing warp-core technology) as well as a fast-moving, external Dyson ring. Irie had been fascinated by the sudden flashes of silver that crossed the outside of Welwyn, scanning and zooming in to see that it was in fact the fast revolutions of a thin ribbon of bright, mercury-looking steel. The Dyson rings were a super-dense composite metal themselves, and their precisely-controlled revolutions (courtesy of home machine intelligences like Ponos, of course) were calculated to distribute Newton’s law of gravity and attraction.
“So…if that Dyson ring stops spinning, everyone inside starts floating?” Val Pathok, the largest Duergar ever seen and the Mercury’s resident gunner, had mumbled behind them. As a Duergar—or more offensively known as ‘troll’ for the white-blue, scaled skin and their tusks, bald heads, and immense size—Val Pathok was used to looking for the violence in any given situation.
“Well, they would start floating, but also the entire platform would start to lose their gravity-attraction…” Eliard remembered his classes from the noble academy that he had been forced to attend as a young, and even more obnoxious, man. “The gravity distribution systems—the same thing that we’ve got in here on the Mercury—would probably stop the whole thing from breaking up, but it would probably be like shaking up a snow globe,” Irie said in wonder. She was like that, the captain had thought with a shudder. She thought in terms of infrastructure and mechanics, not in terms of screaming people.
The troll had seemed quite amused by that, but one stern look from the captain had made sure that the troll wouldn’t try to see what would happen if he shook up a habitat full of rich people.
Welwyn’s dome was egg shaped, and made of a synthetic crystalline-glass structure, strong enough to withstand even meson cannons (and hence the vacuum of space). It was also big, and even that was an understatement. Inside the habitat, the air-space alone was so large that the Imperial Coalition residents could indeed have the sort of experience that they might enjoy on any Earth-normal world, along with air, birds, flights of jets, trees, gardens, and all encouraged by the floating orbs that sedately wobbled around the open space. Eliard was even surprised to see a drift of picture-perfect white clouds scatter above the flights of noble jets.
Welwyn’s ‘topside’ played hosts to gardens and villas set in the folds of earth that had been shipped here from other, less profitable worlds. The captain was glad that he hadn’t let his two crew members onto the surface for this mission partly because he needed them up there in the Mercury in case it all went wrong (despite Ponos’s claims that it wouldn’t), but mostly because he knew that Val would draw attention and Irie wouldn’t be able to stop gawking.
The interior topside of the Welwyn Habitat was sculpted like a series of charming rivieras and parklands, with municipal and lodge buildings tucked away next to old-growth trees and joined by white, crushed-gravel pathways, lined with subtly-glowing LEDs. In the far distance, Eliard could even see a waterfall from a bluff of rocks, as well as pools, woodlands, and even a small, golden strand of beach along a meandering river.
Welwyn was beautiful.
Welwyn is a drag, Eliard thought irritably. A part of him was glad that he wasn’t going to be staying long in this place, even though he had been born to inhabit such idylls as this.
No, Eliard Martin, scion of a noble house, the pirate captain of the Mercury Blade, and with his physiognomy changed by alien technology, had a date with the underside of the Welwyn Habitat.
2
Freddie
“Papers,” announced the drone that hovered in front of Eliard’s face. It was a friendly drone, Eliard thought with a barely-concealed sneer. That meant that it was almost the size of a soccer ball, and was made of a friendly white plastic, bubble-formed and with dimly-glowing green lights. The contraption hovered at eye-level in front of him on the flagstone courtyard outside of the entrance building to Welwyn, and the captain had no doubt that the moment he put a foot wrong, it would engage its concealed lasers at his unprotected flesh.
I’m not even wearing my encounter suit, he thought dismally as he grumbled and coughed, shuffling to bring out his human left arm.
“Papers?” Eliard said in a rasping voice. (Ponos had told him to do anything he could to disguise himself.) “Since when do we use paper anymore? See, all of my identification is right here…” He held out his wrist with its slightly old-fashioned computer mounted bulkily on top.
“At Welwyn, we find that humans prefer to be reminded of a bygone age!” the drone said cheerfully, its green light flashing a momentary orange as it interfaced with Eliard’s wrist computer and read his credentials.
Please, let that walking calculator have done something right! The captain thought about Ponos. It bleeding-well should have, he considered. Ponos was rumored to be one of the most intelligent of the artificial intelligences in the Imperial Coalition, apart from Alpha and whatever House Archival was running, of course.
Beep! The security drone flashed a welcome green and announced, “Greetings, Citizen Father Olan, I see that you are here in Welwyn to attend the Shahasta Spiritual Retreat. Please, let me guide you to the designated Quiet Zone.”
“No thank you!” Eliard said, a tad more frantically. “I can find my own way about, thank you very much!”
The drone bobbed slightly in mid-air. “As you wish, Father Olan.” It turned to engage the next trio of Imperial citizens arriving behind the disguised captain.
“Captain? Everything safe?” Irie’s voice again from the captain’s wrist. When Eliard looked at it, he saw her worried face looking up at him from the small screen.
“Shhh! I told you not to contact me unless it’s urgent!” He scowled. “But I guess you can tell Ponos that his code worked. Welwyn thinks I’m some Shahasta priest.”
“Then you might want to be a bit more civil,” Irie shot back, never one to accept a put-down easily, “and you might consider pulling your hood down a bit further, as well. I can see your face pretty clearly, you know.”
“Ponos said that the code would rewrite the facial-recognition systems!” Eliard said indignantly, but he still found his hands tugging on the bright orange and yellow hood until it shaded his eyes. One of the perks of being a famous space-pirate, the man had to consider, was the fact that he and the rest of the crew of the Mercury Blade were listed on several Imperial Coalition databases for theft, fraud, and a host of other petty and not-so-petty violations.
But it had been Ponos’s insistence that they do this, that they come here, of all places, to the heart of the Imperial Coalition to seek help against the renegade hybrid-intelligence Alpha.
And the stars know that we need it, he thought dismally. Alpha was another artificial machine-intelligence, borne from some unholy combination of Armcore technology and ancient-alien, recovered Valyien tech. He knew it had already infected data-space, the sub-quantum level of space that the humans and other races used to encode and transmit information. Data-space was the network that held the far-flung Imperial Coalition together. It was how families stayed in contact, how money was calculated and flowed, how data was sent and studied, and Alpha had all the access to it that it wanted, and was presumably, the captain thought, even now growing fat on all of that thousands of years’ worth of knowledge.
Enough data to work out humanity’s weaknesses, the captain considered. Enough data to turn Alpha into a god.
The captain picked up his steps as he left the sedate, faux-Mediterranean courtyard and listened as his boots started to crunch on the white-gravel path.
“Would you care for a lift, Citizen?” bleeped another cheery voice. It was a drone-chair, already rising into the air where it had been waiting in its ranks like lawn ornaments. “Where would you like to go? I can carry you for precisely three-point-six kilometers in any direction, am fully equipped with a map of the local surroundings, as well as a detailed miscellany of facts about Welwyn history and geography. Take a ride accompanied by your choice of pre-recorded s
ounds from some of Welwyn’s artists—”
“No, thank you.” Eliard couldn’t think of anything more terrible. “I know where I’m going,” he reiterated, not slowing his pace as the drone-chair elected to settle back down on the grass behind him.
“As you wish, Citizen. Have a glorious time here on Welwyn!” the chair announced before it powered down.
Dear gods… Eliard grumbled to himself. “Maybe it would be a blessing if Alpha wiped out the Imperial Coalition!”
“Father? Father!” The captain had reached the bottom of the rise and was starting the sweeping turn of the path when he was interrupted by a voice of someone catching up behind him.
Oh no. What now? He spun around to see a young lad, barely twelve cycles old (if he wasn’t someone who had taken a bucket-load of anti-ageing genetic enhancements, that was) running towards him. The youth had tanned skin and dark hair, and Eliard could tell, almost immediately from the look of him, that he was a person out of place.
It was the jacket, the captain noted with a scowl as the youth skidded to a halt and bent over, panting with the exertion of sprinting on this hot day. The youth wore standard industrial gray cargo trousers that were covered with pockets, and heavy boots that the captain could see immediately were reinforced with a metal mesh on the underside. Those are worker boots, he thought. And those are industrial worker’s trousers. Whilst it wasn’t unusual for in-space citizens to be industrial workers—everyone had to have a calling, right?—it was unusual for the workers to appear to be as worried as this youth appeared, out here in the tranquil grounds of Welwyn, or for an Imperial Coalition citizen to risk getting their clearly high-class jacket soiled with their work clothes.
“Lose the trousers or the jacket, kid, then you might have a chance,” Eliard grunted, turning back to his tramping step.
A. I. Uprising (Valyien Book 4) Page 2
