A.I. Battle Station (The A.I. Series Book 4)

by Vaughn Heppner

  Gloria studied him anew.

  “I’ll trust you,” she said. “Given your past performances, it is the logical thing to do. I will wait to instruct the others on the possibility that you will assassinate Premier Benz. But I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  Jon nodded, wondering if the Gilgamesh’s gravitational beams were going to kill him today after he killed Benz.

  -3-

  There was a lurch as Jon sat in the piloting chair of the Wastrel.

  The craft was a small shuttle used to ferry personnel between spaceships and space stations. Engineers had modified the shuttle several months ago, adding a missile pod. Jon checked his board. The pod was full of Mark IV Hornets.

  As Jon waited, a giant hangar-bay door began to slide down. The stars shined brightly in the stellar darkness. He looked, but couldn’t see the targeted asteroid or the Gilgamesh. Both were too far away to spot with the naked eye just yet.

  “You’re good to go, Captain,” Gloria said from the Nathan Graham’s bridge.

  On the shuttle, Jon flicked switches and took over manual control of the craft. The small vessel rose from the deck and began to drift toward the open hangar-bay door.

  Soon, the Wastrel drifted outside. The shuttle was like a flea next to the monstrous Nathan Graham. The small craft drifted farther away. Behind it, the great hangar-bay door closed.

  “You can begin acceleration,” Gloria told him over the comm.

  “Roger,” he said.

  “Good luck,” she added.

  “Thanks,” he muttered.

  In seconds, the Wastrel was accelerating toward the nearby asteroid indicated on the sensor board. Because of the thruster, Jon was pressed back against his chair. The shuttle was too small to possess gravity dampeners. Thus, he had to withstand the acceleration the old-fashioned way, by enduring it.

  The Wastrel rapidly built up velocity as it headed toward a lumpy nickel-iron asteroid 83,000 kilometers away.

  It was a small asteroid, as such things went, with an irregular shape. While the nickel-iron content was high enough to mine, the distance from the dwarf planet of Ceres had so far made it a cost-prohibitive venture. That was different from the way things worked in the Kuiper Belt. There, such a close asteroid would have been considered a bonanza of wealth. But the Kuiper Belt people would have used low-velocity catapults to send the mined ores to a space factory. People in the Asteroid Belt were in too much of a hurry to do it that way. Maybe that would change now that the object belonged to the Mars Unity. Robo-builders could set up a processing planet on the asteroid in a month, maybe as long as six weeks. In any case—

  With focused intent, Jon put that from his mind as he studied his sensor board.

  Cybership Gilgamesh had halted as per the protocols worked out three weeks ago. It was a one-hundred-kilometer vessel just like the Nathan Graham. Alien robots had built it who knew how long ago. Now, humans ran it. The Gilgamesh and the Nathan Graham represented the bulk of humanity’s space power. The two pirated vessels dwarfed the rest of the warships in the Solar System.

  A year and a half ago, three AI-controlled cyberships had assaulted humanity with intent to genocide. How many cyberships would the enemy send next time? Would it be nine or ninety giant war vessels?

  Jon shook his head. Humanity could not face nine enemy cyberships at the same time. How long would it take the AIs to gather nine such vessels in one location?

  We don’t know anything about events out there.

  Jon’s eyes narrowed. That had to change as fast as possible. A strategist could not make decisions without knowledge of the enemy. Humanity had survived two AI assaults. They had fought with their backs against the precipice of extinction. Humanity had gained breathing space, but little more. This meeting with Benz was to make sure humanity could attempt more. But more was never going to happen if humanity waged yet more civil war amongst themselves. It was time to…

  Well, if humanity couldn’t unite—Jon couldn’t see working with the Social Dynamists of Earth. But he could see leaving the Solar League alone if they would leave the SFF and the Mars Unity alone.

  He noticed a red light blinking on his comm board. How long had it been doing that? Exerting himself against the Gs, he tapped the board.

  “Jon,” Gloria said. “I’m getting a faint but strange reading from the asteroid.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s gone,” she said, sounding surprised. “I saw something. It was a pulse, I think.”

  “And…?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. It might have come from an object near the asteroid or on it. I didn’t have time to pinpoint its location.”

  “What kind of object?”

  “Possibly a drone of some kind,” Gloria said.

  Jon closed his eyes. Had Benz set up for a double-cross? He could hardly believe the Premier thought he could get away with something so obvious.

  “Just a minute,” Gloria said. “Chief Ghent suggests I could have seen a sensor echo.”

  “How likely is that?” Jon asked.

  “Given the mass of sensor signals from the Gilgamesh and us—I don’t know. Ghent could be right. It’s possible, at least.”

  “Possible means that he could be wrong,” Jon said.

  “Yes,” Gloria said in a clipped voice.

  Jon thought about that. “I’ll keep my eyes open.”

  “And I’ll keep studying the situation. Jon—”

  “I have to go,” he said, interrupting. “There’s a red light on my fuel board.”

  Jon clicked off the comm and sat back against the acceleration chair.

  There were no red lights on any of his boards. He’d wanted to get off the comm before Gloria said something she shouldn’t. Was something hidden out there or had Gloria only discovered an echo?

  Jon bent his head in thought. The idea of dying kept intruding. He hated the thought, but finally managed to submerge it. A minute later, he realized that he would continue with the meeting. But he’d add a little adjustment to the shuttle…just in case Gloria had spotted something fishy out there.

  -4-

  The Wastrel braked hard as it approached the misshapen asteroid. In the distance on the opposite side of the stellar object appeared a long fusion tail. Benz’s shuttlecraft also braked.

  Ninety thousand kilometers away—in the direction of the Sun—waited Cybership Gilgamesh. Even though it was one hundred kilometers in diameter, Jon couldn’t see it with the naked eye. That was the thing with the interplanetary void—its sheer size that hid even the largest manmade objects.

  So far, neither the Nathan Graham’s nor the Wastrel’s sensors had detected any sign of what Gloria might have seen earlier.

  Jon wasn’t going to worry about that. If it was something, he had made his plans regarding it.

  The asteroid loomed before him. He took over manual control and soon landed the shuttle in a small valley, with metallic cliffs overlooking the craft.

  There was negligible gravity without the deceleration. The asteroid was roughly three hundred kilometers in diameter, which made it rather large in relation to the majority of asteroids in the belt.

  Jon floated to the locker in back and opened it with a touch of his palm. A seven-foot black-coated Neptunian battlesuit waited for him. It was bent forward and open in back.

  Jon climbed into the battlesuit, shoving his feet in first. Soon, he thrust his arms through the sleeves. He activated the magnetic seals, which snapped shut one after the other. With a few flicks, he energized the power pack, making the servomotors purr.

  He walked out of the locker backward, but stayed hunched forward so the helmet wouldn’t smash against the ceiling.

  Running a quick diagnostic, he made sure he had full air-tanks, charged batteries and gyroc ammo for the rifle. Lastly, he checked that the smart rockets in the back-launcher were ready to go.

  Yes. Everything was in order.

  He chin-clicked his helmet comm, sending several pulses
. Those would go to the Nathan Graham, letting them know he was about to leave the Wastrel.

  On the other side of the asteroid, Premier Benz was likely doing the same thing.

  Jon hesitated. He was going to go out alone onto the asteroid. If Benz was playing fast and loose with him… Jon muttered an obscenity and pressed a bulkhead switch. The atmosphere drained from the craft. The shuttle lacked a normal airlock. It wouldn’t matter today.

  With the battlesuit powered down low, he manually opened the main hatch and worked his way outside onto the rocky surface.

  The suit’s heater went on. Air cycled more powerfully, and his chest and helmet lamps snapped on, giving him illumination. Jon moved slowly and deliberately as he took several gliding steps. He was an expert at zero-G maneuvering. This was the next thing to it with the asteroid’s negligible gravity.

  Stopping, he turned, regarding the Wastrel. He might never return.

  He snorted to himself. He had to stop being so morbid or melodramatic. The meeting had been his idea. It was time to get it on.

  Jon faced forward, looked up at the stars and kept himself from trying to find the Nathan Graham. It was out there, and was watching him.

  Determined to get started, Jon took his next gliding jump-step. It propelled him along the rocky surface. He had a long way to travel to meet Benz. The two of them would have the opportunity to talk to each other without worrying about anyone else listening in on them. They would be able to speak frankly.

  That was the point of doing it this way.

  Jon had a knack for shelving his worries and concentrating on the problem at hand. In this instance, that was making sure he didn’t jump farther than the asteroid’s escape velocity. It wouldn’t do for the hardened space marine/mercenary to float away into orbit, having to call for someone to pull him down from space. He had a legend to uphold and a rep to maintain. Therefore, Jon put his thoughts and effort into moving as fast and as safely as he could under the circumstances.

  In another hundred kilometers, give or take, he could finally get down to the business of judging Premier Benz fit or unfit for duty.

  -5-

  A blip appeared on Jon’s HUD sensor. He used a zoom function, spotting a Martian battlesuit applying thrust as if it was flying low over the asteroidal surface.

  Under normal gravity, the spaceborne Martian battlesuit would have weighed 0.93 tons. That one would be even heavier due to the thruster packs attached to the back.

  White hydrogen thrust expelled from the pack, easing the Martian battlesuit lower toward the rock-strewn surface.

  It appeared that Benz had jumped too hard, lifting from the asteroid as he gained escape velocity. It also appeared that Benz had doubted his asteroid-walking skills. He had thus wisely added a thruster pack to his battlesuit. Given the distance of travel over the asteroid, Jon doubted Benz had been flying the entire way, as that would take too much fuel.

  Jon had no such thruster pack on his suit. He did not doubt his skills, although he did carry an anchor gun attached to his left thigh just in case of a miscalculation.

  Soon, the Martian battlesuit regained the surface. Benz began to glide-walk across the surface toward the destination point.

  Jon also headed for the agreed-upon spot, his heart rate increasing as he did so. This was a historical occasion. Would his coming action brand him a treacherous cur for the rest of human history? Or would he be hailed as the man who had taken the needed step to bring about human unity that eventually allowed them to overcome the AIs?

  What had Colonel Graham taught him? The winners wrote the histories.

  I’d better make sure I win. Then I can tell the story as it really happened.

  Jon snorted to himself. Maybe he was getting too big for his britches. He’d gotten lucky a few times. He was a mercenary soldier who had taken the logical steps given his various situations. Those steps had worked. That didn’t make him a genius. Maybe it made him a hard fighter, though.

  He shrugged. It didn’t matter now. He would do what he had always done: the best he could under the circumstances. Yeah, he liked to win. As far as he could see, he liked winning more than most people did. He believed that because he tried harder than most did. Maybe that had come about because of his love of stories. He tried to live up to the heroes in his stories, and that meant never saying die until you were dead. Anything else was being a quitter. Quitters were losers, and the title of loser galled Jon more than anything else could.

  As long as he kept fighting, no matter the conflict, he hadn’t yet lost.

  It occurred to him that this thinking had a morbid quality to it. Did he suspect that he was going to try to kill Benz today no matter what? What was the point of the meeting then? If he knew Benz had to die, he should have set this up differently so he could survive the killing.

  Maybe Benz and he could work together. Yet, if Benz was the genius people said he was, how could Jon afford to take the Nathan Graham into hyperspace? With the SFF’s cybership out of the way, Benz could use the Gilgamesh to pry the Jupiter or Uranus System out of the Solar Freedom Force. That would be the beginning of the end for the SFF.

  “There are too many ifs,” he muttered.

  Jon closed the distance between them, finding that his heart was pounding harder than ever.

  -6-

  Benz and Hawkins faced each other in their battlesuits. They had hooked up a landline between them, giving them a direct connection to each other. According to the rules of the meeting, they had each switched off any suit recorders or comm lines back to their respective cybership. They had also each run suit-scans to make sure the other fellow had complied with the rules. Lastly, each man allowed a helmet sensor to send an image of his face to the other.

  Benz’s face appeared on Jon’s HUD screen.

  Frank Benz was of medium height, making him a little shorter than Jon. Even though Benz was in his early forties, he had shiny dark hair and the lean features of an athletic individual.

  According to the Benz dossier in the Old Man’s Intelligence files, the Premier had played hockey, football and basketball in his youth. He hadn’t shown exceptional intelligence in those years. That had come afterward and most suddenly. According to Gloria, the sudden jump implied some sort of intelligence heightening. There were some strange rumors regarding that.

  Was it possible to become considerably smarter? Jon wouldn’t mind a sudden increase in intelligence. It chilled him as he looked in Benz’s eyes. Jon did sense something extraordinary in the man. He didn’t like it, either.

  “This is an honor,” Benz said in a commanding voice.

  “The honor is mine,” Jon said, maybe a little too quickly.

  Benz smiled. It had a predatory quality to it.

  For a moment, Jon believed that Benz knew what he planned to do. Jon didn’t see how that could be possible, though. Thus, he dismissed the idea through force of will.

  “How is Bast Banbeck doing?” the Premier asked.

  Bast was a seven-foot alien, a Sacerdote.

  “Well enough,” Jon said. “He misses his people the longer he’s away from them.”

  “Is there any way I can convince you to let the Sacerdote work with us for a time?” Benz asked.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Benz nodded. “Have you finished constructing your second cybership yet out at Makemake?”

  Makemake was a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt. The dwarf planet’s hollowed-out moon was a captured alien construction yard. That was where the Nathan Graham had gone a year and a half ago for battle repairs.

  Jon felt a thrill of fear work through his chest at the question. How could the man know about the second cybership?

  “Ah…” Benz said. “I see I was correct. You are building a second cybership.”

  Jon’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  “No,” Benz said. “We don’t have any spies out there. It was the logical move on your part. I’m telling you this in order to let you know that I’
m going to speak truthfully to you today.”

  “They say you’re a genius,” Jon found himself blurting.

  “It’s true,” Benz said. “I’m the smartest man in the Solar System. Vela Shaw is the smartest woman.”

  “Should you control the Solar System, then?”

  Benz seemed to study him. “My answer is highly important to you, I see. I wonder why that is…”

  Jon put on his best poker face.

  Benz shook his head. “That’s not going to help you, I’m afraid. I’m a master at reading faces. You’re an open book to me, Jon.”

  “Yeah? Then tell me what I’m thinking?”

  “It’s obvious,” Benz said. “You want to know if I plan to conquer the Solar System.”

  Jon’s face heated up. “I want to know if you’re going to try.”

  “Given my superior abilities, you must realize that amounts to the same thing.”

  The heat intensified until Jon abruptly looked away. He thought about Benz’s words.

  “You’re trying to piss me off,” Jon said. “Why?”

  “To take your measure,” Benz said. “Last time I spoke to you, you stood on your bridge during the Battle of Mars. You were in your element, in your glory. Today, it’s just the two of us out here.”

  Jon felt the hidden dome rat in his heart begin to rise to the surface, the gang enforcer who had to break bones at times during collections. He’d lived a hard life, had done hard things. He hadn’t enjoyed that, but he’d learned to do what he had to in order to win.

  He stared into Benz’s strangely cunning eyes. He could almost feel the heat of the man’s hyper-intelligence. It was eerie.

  “Are you going to try to conquer the Solar System?” Jon asked.

  “Not with the Nathan Graham in the way. Not with the Solar League ready to send their fleets at Mars at the first real opportunity.”

  “But if you could try it…?”

  “Isn’t unity superior to chaos?” Benz asked.