That burned going down his throat. It felt good, though, because he knew what was about to happen. The seconds ticked away…
Ah, the sensation he desired struck his brain. It soothed away some of his terror of the enemy.
Bast cleared his throat.
“I do not understand your response,” the core unit said. “What does that signify?”
“I am an analyzer unit,” Bast said. “I have uncovered…errors in your sub-processors.”
“I do not detect any errors.”
“I know. That is one of the problems. You should have already detected your loss of function.”
“That does not compute.”
Bast refrained from laughing. He believed he was onto something here. What was the correct way to talk to this monster?
Bast slyly looked around again, smiled at a man glancing at him, and lifted the silver container when the scientist looked away.
Bast took a longer swallow this time. He almost coughed as a result. Scotch whiskey was strong. The soothing sensation came on even more powerfully than before.
For a moment, he didn’t give a damn if the next test worked or not. The robot core could rot in the Underworld for all he cared.
“Play back your directive,” Bast commanded.
“Your request is in error. You have failed to begin the grade one command with an authorization code.”
“I’ll give you an authorization code,” Bast said under his breath.
The Sacerdote leaned forward and tapped out a quick sequence on his console. Probably, it would fail and—
“I am initiating your request. Granted,” the robot voice said. “I have a priority deception mission in progress. I am attempting to lure the Nathan Graham and its accompanying vessels to assault the Allamu System Battle Station.”
“So far so good,” Bast said in a hollow voice. Was this right? What was the correct way to proceed from this opening?
Bast opened his coat, took out the small container, shaking it, and was greatly saddened to realize it was almost empty. He unscrewed the cap and drained the contents.
The accompanying sensation numbed his mind sufficiently for him to proceed.
In a matter of minutes, Bast had the core unit downloading the critical data. It proved lengthy and daunting.
For a moment then, Bast was unsure what to do with his breakthrough. The Sacerdote had a good idea what Jon Hawkins would want to do, and that was not what he desired.
“I have to hide this,” Bast said under his breath.
“Hide what?” a woman said.
Bast turned around in surprise, feeling lightheaded as he did so. Normally, he had the sharpest hearing on the cybership. Why had the mentalist snuck up on him?
“I asked you a question,” Gloria said.
Bast froze, not knowing what he should do next.
-23-
Jon sat back in his study, listening and watching as Bast and Gloria showed him the evidence.
The Sacerdote had crashed into a cushy chair, seeming more like a great ape than the brainy philosopher he was. The huge alien sprawled in the chair. If Jon didn’t know better, he’d say that Bast had been drinking.
Gloria sat on a regular chair with a clicker in hand. She kept showing shots of the various items they had uncovered from the talkative core unit Bast had somehow broken open.
“Let me get this straight,” Jon said. “The unit was attempting to lure us to this…AI battle station?”
Bast nodded in what almost seemed to be a miserable manner.
“Just a minute,” Jon said. “Bast, what’s wrong?”
The Sacerdote shook his Neanderthal-like head.
“Your eyes are bloodshot,” Jon said. “I’ve never seen them that bloodshot before.”
“I’m tired,” Bast said. He belched a second later. It was loud, crude and it smelled like—
“You’ve been drinking whiskey,” Jon said.
Gloria looked up sharply from her chair.
Jon got up and stepped nearer Bast.
The Sacerdote sat up, digging in a lab-coat pocket. A second later, he brought up a packet of mints, tearing one loose and popping it into his cavernous mouth.
“Phew!” Jon said. “How much whiskey have you been drinking?”
“A few bottles,” Bast mumbled with what seemed like numbed lips.
“When did you drink them?” Jon asked.
“I imagine just before we came here,” Gloria said. “Bast told me he had to get something from his room first. He must have consumed the whiskey then.”
“Is that right?” Jon asked.
“Who can know?” Bast said as he slumped back in the chair.
Jon glanced at Gloria before shaking his head at Bast. “Just how many bottles did you drink?”
For a moment, Jon thought Bast was going to get mulish and not say. Finally, he mumbled, “Three.”
“Three?” Jon said. “And you’re still standing?”
“I’m sitting now,” Bast slurred.
“You can’t drink whiskey like it’s beer,” Jon said. “What are you trying to do? Kill yourself?”
“No…”
Jon glanced at Gloria before asking Bast, “Is something troubling you?”
“Why would you say that?” Bast slurred.
“He’s drunk,” Gloria said.
Jon peered at Bast more closely.
“You don’t look well,” Jon said. “You’re not going to get sick on me, are you?”
Bast belched again, and he twisted where he sat. He turned a different shade of green then.
“I’m calling medical,” Jon said, moving to his desk.
“No, wait,” Bast said.
“You have to—”
“No!” Bast said with a roar.
Jon turned.
The seven-foot alien forced himself out of the cushy chair so he towered to his full height. He seemed enraged.
“You will call no one,” Bast said loudly. “You will…”
Another belch rose from him. He swayed where he stood. Just in time, he turned his head and vomited a gush of fluids. At that point, Bast staggered to the side, slumped against the wall as he slid onto the floor. His head slid sideways onto his shoulder. His eyelids closed and Bast began to snore.
“Three bottles?” asked Gloria.
Jon didn’t respond. He was at his desk, pressing a switch, issuing swift orders. It seemed to him, despite the Sacerdote’s resistance to alcohol, that Bast might have given himself alcohol poisoning. Something must be seriously troubling the big lug.
***
Medics slid a snoring Bast Banbeck away on a gurney. They would run a few tests and observe him until his liver purged the whiskey from his system.
“I thought he was acting strangely,” Gloria said.
They’d moved to a different room. This one had a billiard table and a wet bar.
“But I chalked it up to his being a Sacerdote,” Gloria added. “Why do you think he drank so much?”
“Good question,” Jon said. “Most people drink like that because they don’t want to think about something. They want to escape a problem they find hard to handle.”
“Do you believe that’s what Bast is doing?”
“It’s a good place to start looking,” Jon said. “It’s got to be daunting being the only one of his kind around. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.”
“Agreed,” Gloria said. She waited a few seconds, seemed to stand a little straighter, if that was possible, and said, “We should finish analyzing the new data.”
Jon scratched his shoulder. A medic was going to take off the cast later. His bone had mended quicker than normal with the new medical technology they were using. It would be good to work the shoulder again. One thing about the quicker healing was that it meant less time for the muscles to atrophy.
“Still thinking about Bast?” asked Gloria.
Jon smiled. It was good to know that she couldn’t read his mind. He liked her bril
liance. But sometimes, a person could be too smart. He didn’t like the idea of her being able to decipher his thoughts before he uttered them.
“Bast will be fine,” Gloria said.
“Maybe,” Jon said. “Three bottles… I wonder if this battle station is what’s bothering him.”
“We don’t know that much about the battle station. The Allamu System appears to be near Altair. The battle station—let me bring up the specs.”
Jon nodded.
Gloria went to a computer console and began to type and tap on the screen. Soon, she sat back, indicating the screen.
Jon moved closer, examining the data.
According to this, the station was big.
“It’s five hundred kilometers in diameter?” Jon asked in surprise.
“Five times longer than our cybership,” Gloria said as she examined the screen. “It appears to be a space-dock, maybe a repair yard as well.”
“What about the planet?”
The blurry image showed a battle station in orbit around a large blue-and-green terrestrial planet, maybe 1.5 times as large as Earth.
“What about the planet?” Gloria asked.
“Does it belong to another race or is the planet a converted AI factory?”
Gloria typed on the keyboard and tapped the screen for a time. Finally:
“I don’t know,” she said. “I doubt the captured stealth pod has complete data regarding the battle station. The idea of a robot trying to lure us there…”
Gloria turned around to stare at Jon.
“Who exactly concocted the plan?” she asked.
“A robot, just like you suggested,” Jon said.
“That’s self-evident,” she said quietly. “And that’s not what I was asking. What kind of robot. What—? Hmm… Did the plan originate in the Solar System?”
“Oh,” Jon said. “I see what you mean. The present situation could be like the time we fought the robots after the original war in the Neptune System that gave us the Nathan Graham.”
“Precisely,” Gloria said.
“Meaning,” he said, “that the robot brain that concocted the plan is likely still in the Solar System.”
“That would be my guess as well,” she said.
Then Gloria got that look on her pretty face that said she was computing data. Her head shifted slightly from side to side as she did so.
She looked up at him sharply.
“Jon, I may have uncovered a problem.”
He nodded for her to keep talking.
“It would seem that you fought a successful action against the robots at the asteroid. I’m beginning to wonder if you were supposed to win that fight.”
“You could have a point,” Jon said. “Our defeat of the octopoids always felt fishy to me.”
“Maneuvering stealth pods onto our hull may have been the bigger prize,” Gloria said. “There’s another thing. Benz discovered an AI stealth pod in far-outer Martian orbit just before we entered hyperspace. Why did Benz find it then? None of us had found any until that moment. Because of the warning, we searched our hull afterward, and poor Samuel Latterly attempted to kill you because a conversion unit had made it inside his skull.”
“Was my near-assassination supposed to be another AI deception?” Jon asked.
“At this point, I deem that as highly probable.” Gloria’s features stiffened into her “computing” mode. She looked up soon. “That brings us to our present dilemma.”
Jon nodded encouragingly.
“What if this is another deception?” she asked.
“You mean the deceiving robot wanting us to know it’s trying to lure us to the battle station?”
“Yes,” Gloria said.
“How could that be a deception?”
“Exactly,” Gloria said. “That’s what we must determine. Because if that’s true, we have a still greater hidden problem on our hands.”
-24-
Jon rotated his shoulder. It was stiff, the muscles there weaker than this other shoulder, but it felt good to get the cast off.
“Thanks,” he said.
The medic was a taller woman with a stylus in her left hand.
“I want you to take it easy on the shoulder for a few days,” she said. “Give it time to get back up to speed.”
“I can do that.”
“You’re still young and resilient. You naturally take to the new medical treatments. Someone like the Old Man, though…”
The medic shook her head.
“Is Bast still in medical?” Jon asked.
“No. He left an hour ago.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Jon departed shortly thereafter. He took a flitter, flying through a vast main corridor. There were many like this connecting the huge cybership. Jon enjoyed flying. It allowed him time to think. He sipped from a steaming enclosed cup of coffee as he flew.
Could Gloria be right about the stealth pod? Did the guiding unit in the Solar System want him to know about the battle station? Did the unit want them to attack the battle station? Why would the unit think the station would entice him?
Well, the unit must know he’d stormed the original cybership, the present-day Nathan Graham. The deceiving unit must also know he’d attacked and helped defeat the last AI assault. Yet why would the robot unit believe—?
“Oh,” Jon said.
He might have stumbled onto the answer. Yet, the more he thought about this, the more he realized attacking the battle station might be exactly the right move.
He opened the cup cover to get the last swallow of coffee, tossed the cup and put both hands on the controls, increasing speed. It was time for an emergency meeting with his closest advisors.
“Right,” Jon said as the excitement built in his gut.
***
Jon stood at the head of a conference table. He’d summoned Bast Banbeck, Gloria, the Centurion—the small bald killer with hard eyes was the regiment’s colonel—the tall and dark-haired Old Man who ran Intelligence, Uther Kling the Missile Chief and Chief Technician Ghent.
Bast seemed downcast and was sweating slightly. Jon hoped the Sacerdote hadn’t had any more whiskey.
The rest of the people listened to Gloria speak and watched the slides on the big screen. She repeated her suspicions regarding the robot deception plan. She talked about the little they knew regarding the battle station and she showed them its location. Finally, she ended her briefing, glancing at Jon.
“Any questions so far?” Jon asked.
There were plenty. They mainly concerned the size, strength and AI utility of the battle station. Only the Old Man asked about the evidence regarding the suspicion about possible robot deceptions.
After a time, the questions ceased. One by one, the others looked up at Jon. He was sitting now, waiting.
“The seemingly placid look on your face indicates that you are about to tell us something critical,” Gloria told Jon.
“I believe our commander thinks of that as his poker face,” the Old Man said in a good-natured way.
Jon pointed at the Old Man.
The Intelligence officer dyed his hair black. Its true color must be gray or white. Jon could hardly picture the Old Man with white hair.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jon said quietly.
Bast Banbeck sat up straighter as a fearful look swept across his green Neanderthal features. He seemed to be trying to master the fear. He wiped his lips with the back of his left wrist.
“Here’s what I see as the relevant point,” Jon said. “We’re in a bind. By that, I mean humanity. We’ve managed to fight off two major AI assaults. If we had failed during either assault, we as a race would be dead. Now, we have to build up militarily before the next and logically bigger AI assault hits us. It’s self-evident, as Gloria would say, that humanity should unite into one team. We’re far from doing that, though. Humanity would also do better if we could find alien allies to stand with us.
“Unfortunately,” Jon said, “there’s a problem with alien allies. First, we have to find them. Second, we have to convince them to trust us. That might be hard when we show up in their star system with an AI cybership.”
“Right…” Uther Kling said. “I hadn’t thought of that part. It’s obvious, though. To an outside observer, we’re an AI cybership.”
Gloria rolled her eyes. Likely, the mentalist had thought of that a long time ago.
“Luckily, we have an ace card,” Jon said. “I’m referring to the AI virus we used at Mars. Now, I don’t know how long such an ace will last. The sooner we can use it, the better. Unfortunately, once we use the virus against the AIs, they’re probably going to develop a counter for it.
“The virus is our great secret weapon,” Jon said. “In war, secret weapons never last long. The best way to use a secret weapon is in a huge battle that gains a critical strategic point.”
Jon leaned toward the others, searching their eyes. He could see that a few of them already understood where he was going with this.
“Think about the battle station,” Jon said. “It’s massive. It must have docked cyberships. It must be able to repair cyberships and maybe even build them. The planet below might be a giant factory world, an automated plant.”
“We don’t know any of those things for certain,” the Old Man said slowly.
“I’ll tell you another thing,” Jon said, ignoring the interruption. “We know the location of the battle station. We don’t know where anything else is in the nearby region of space. I would imagine the battle station has stellar maps of incredible accuracy.”
“Jon,” Gloria said. “It sounds as if you’re thinking about attacking the station.”
“Attacking and occupying it,” Jon said.
Bast groaned under his breath.
Gloria stared at Jon in befuddlement.
The Centurion’s eyes gleamed with anticipation.
The Old Man was thoughtful.
“How do we occupy a station five hundred kilometers in diameter?” Gloria asked. “We don’t have the manpower for that.”
“True,” Jon said.
“Then…?” Gloria said, perplexed.
“Clearly, we can’t do this alone,” Jon said. “We have to gather everything we can muster and hit that battle station hard. We have to get space marines inside and take it over.”
A.I. Battle Station (The A.I. Series Book 4) Page 9
