Star Force 10: Outcast

by B. V. Larson

  “Electromagnetic pulse, or any magnetic field, can control our nanites,” I replied. “What controls these?”

  “I don’t know yet. The scientists are working on it.”

  I watched a crystal claw go into the factory’s maw. It was disturbing how much the claw looked like the grasping hand of a stone statue. The outstretched fingers went into the grinder last, and the screeching sounded like that of a wood-chipper working on bone.

  “We might regret doing this,” I said.

  Adrienne eyed me. “You lamented about using Lithos as raw material, and I can understand that. We wouldn’t like it if they built ships out of dead marines.”

  “No, we wouldn’t. We shouldn’t make a habit of this process, either. They might be able to detect the fact that we’ve recycled their dead and take offense.”

  Adrienne looked at the factory maw thoughtfully. “You’re holding out hope that we can come to terms with these creatures someday, aren’t you?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “Think of the alternatives. Eventually, either we have to wipe them out or they have to wipe us out. That is—unless we can achieve some form of peace.”

  She looked troubled, so I changed the topic.

  “You said something about scientists working on Litho anatomy,” I prompted her.

  “Yes. I assigned them to study the Lithos because having them help run the factory caused more problems than it solved. The scientists work better as a think tank, so I gave them their own laboratory and enough work until we set down.” Adrienne pointed at a door nearby.

  When I entered the think tank I saw the three human scientists with their eyes glued to instruments—microscopes, scanners and the like. Hoon was absent. He preferred to work in his own watery quarters where he was more comfortable. I also suspected he didn’t get along well with the human science team.

  On a high-magnification screen I could see nanites moving, performing their incomprehensible tasks. I’d seen such things before, of course. Everyone had, at least on documentary vids, but these looked a bit different. Where our nanites, descendants of the original Nano ships, looked like spidery construction machines that scurried here and there, the Lithos appeared to be crystals that mostly stayed interlocked with each other. They would slide and move without ever really losing touch with each other.

  Doctor Benson, the most senior of the scientists, noticed me and jumped up to rush over. “Hello, Captain Riggs, Good to see you again. You remember Doctors Chang and Kalu.”

  “Doctor,” I greeted him, and then the other two: “Doctor; Doctor. I thought I’d drop by and check on your research.”

  Kalu looked at me with her big eyes for a moment then turned away.

  Benson gushed about his findings, oblivious to his colleague’s unease. “Oh, it’s absolutely fascinating, Captain. The intermodal tendencies of these silico-nanites are unmatched. We—”

  I put on my best smile. “Doctor Benson? Could you please summarize—for a layman?”

  The man cleared his throat and wiped his hands on the front of his white lab coat. “Yes, of course. The Lithos are a silicon-based life form that seems to be infinitely reconfigurable and scalable.”

  I held up my hand again. “You mean, they’re communal and can form structures of any size?”

  “Yes. And, the larger the network they form, the more intelligent they become. They—”

  Again, my hand rose to get the man to pause. “How large must a colony be before they become collectively sentient?”

  “That’s a hard question to answer because of the variable threshold of true intelligence. I—”

  “How large,” I asked, breaking in again, “to be of average adult human intelligence? Just an approximation.”

  Benson squirmed, but eventually told me twenty tons and up seemed to be about right. That was an interesting number to me because the snowflakes varied from about five to twenty tons at the largest. Apparently the Lithos wanted their suicide troops to be just smart enough to do their jobs, but not enough to have much instinct for self-preservation. Maybe the larger snowflakes were the assault commanders. “So how smart is one of their cruisers—a mountain-sized ship?”

  Throwing up his hands, Benson said, “I can’t answer that. Intelligence isn’t linear. Dolphins have far larger brains than we do but aren’t as conventionally intelligent. A brainbox, even a big one, can store far more data and calculate faster than a biotic but still lacks all imagination. Then there is an anomaly like the Marvin robot.” Seeing my brows furrow, he went on hastily, “The best test of intelligence is to observe behavior. I don’t think the Litho ships are any smarter than one of our ships with its captain and crew. That’s probably the best comparison: the larger the Litho, the more it acts like a community rather than one unitary individual.”

  “So where does one Litho end and another begin?”

  “I can’t answer that right now. It could take years or decades to come to even the most basic understanding of the Litho anatomy and culture.”

  I sighed unhappily. “Doctor, that’s all very interesting, and I’m sure it’s valuable in the long run. But right now, I need insights that will help us survive their attacks and to fight back.”

  Benson drew himself up in a huff. “I am a scientist. I am not military nor am I interested in developing ways to kill another sentient species.” His voice dripped contempt.

  Irritated, I put my index finger on the man’s chest and prodded him with it. “The Macros were sentient and bent on the destruction of all biotic life. I assume you have no problem killing those "sentient" beings. These Lithos have chased us all over the system repeatedly attacking us even when we posed them no threat. I’m not looking for a way to commit genocide, but I would like to stay alive and get home. What about you, Doctor? Got a wife and kids at home, or a mother, father?”

  Benson turned red and sputtered.

  I turned to take in the other two, who were staring at us.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “This isn’t a scientific expedition. Valiant is a Star Force warship. Our most important mission is to make it back to known space and report our findings. I don’t want anyone to commit some kind of atrocity, but we need intel. Study the aliens all you want. Discover everything you can. But if I ever find out you’ve withheld anything that might increase our chances of survival, anything that we can use in a fight, I will consider you traitors to the human race and to our allied biotics. You’ll be tried and punished on that basis. The standard punishment for conviction is immediate spacing of the perpetrator, I must remind you.”

  I took an angry breath and eyed them. They looked alarmed. None of them said a word.

  “These Lithos were apparently built to kill Macros,” I told them. “If they can beat the Macros, they can probably beat us, too. Who knows how far they’ve spread? They might be on Earth’s doorstep even now with an armada, waiting to burst through a ring we don’t know about. The Lithos we found here might represent their weakest rear guard. They may own a hundred systems.” I slammed my fist into the wall, deforming the smart metal for a moment and making the scientists jump. “You three may hold the fate of humanity in your hands. Don’t fall in love with your subjects and forget you’re human.”

  With that, I stalked out, containing myself. I’d given in to my temper, but I hadn’t lost control. Hopefully, the eggheads in their lab had gotten my message. I doubted whether the crew or the marines would be so understanding if they thought the scientists were sympathetic to the enemy.

  Back in the big room, I saw that Adrienne sat idly tapping at her touchscreen. The factory that occupied the center squatted silently, and no lines of marines brought their chunks of materials to feed it. Seeing me, she waved.

  “Run out of spare parts?” I asked as I moved to her side.

  “Yes. There’s nothing left to reprocess.” She tilted her head and looked at me. “You can’t fool me, Cody Riggs. That smile is pasted on.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “
I’m pissed off. Those big brains in the lab…all they care about is studying the Lithos over the next few years or possibly decades. When I told them I needed ways to fight them now, Benson as much as accused me of being a baby killer. Here they are, grinding up the enemy dead and dissecting them, and somehow I’m the bad guy for trying to find a more efficient way to kill them. I told Benson he’d better get with the program, or else.”

  “Or else what?” she asked.

  I wasn’t sure what she was thinking, but I decided to try to make her understand my position.

  “Adrienne, I’m the captain. It’s my responsibility to get us home and get the information we’ve collected back to Star Force. To do that, everyone under my command, civilian or military, alien, human or robot, has to pull his weight. I can’t have them holding back because they sympathize with the enemy.”

  “We did draw first blood, remember,” she said. “That’s something to keep in mind if you want to make peace with them eventually.”

  “Huh?”

  “Inside the hollow planet. When the snowflakes were coming our direction, we shot first. Maybe they were just trying to establish contact.”

  “Have you forgotten the dirt-creatures trying to grab you on Tullax 6?”

  Adrienne crossed her arms, cradling her breasts as if she was cold.

  “No,” she admitted, “but those were probably wild Lithos, out of touch with their society and programmed to attack anything made of metal. I bet they mistook our suits for Macros. Or maybe they wouldn’t have hurt me. Maybe they would have tried to form a connection, nanite to nanite.”

  I shook my head. “They would have detected the metallic nanites in your bloodstream and tried to kill you. Has everyone started to feel sorry for these creatures? They don’t have to keep attacking us, you know. They could try to talk to us by some other method. The Pandas use radio, and the Lithos are smart enough to figure out how to use it too, but they haven’t tried to talk to us.”

  That seemed to give her pause. We’d searched for signals on every conceivable frequency and beamed some of our own before going radio silent, but had found only that one gamma carrier wave. We needed Marvin to decode it, and he wasn’t talking.

  “Look,” I said, “I’d love to call a truce and open negotiations with the Lithos, but until then, we have to be ready to fight. That’s just a fact, unless you want to give up and die. I’m not going to do that or let anyone on this ship consider it.” I grabbed her by her shoulders, wanting to shake some sense into her, but I gentled my touch. “I’m going to get us home, Adrienne. I swear it. But I need everyone to help. I need them to do their best, and I need you. To convince them, I mean,” I hastened to say, letting go and dropping my eyes.

  “I understand, Cody,” she said gently, reaching out to touch my arm briefly. “You’ve got a tough job, and you’ve been…I can’t imagine anyone else doing it better. I’m sorry. I was trying to be helpful in my own way. I didn't realize how it was coming across. We're all under so much stress right now.”

  I touched her wrist and then ran my fingers up her arm to rest my hand on her shoulder.

  “That’s okay,” I told her. “Everyone’s on edge. As soon as we find a place to set down, we can all relax.” I lingered, touching her a moment longer. I was elated that I’d avoided some kind of blow-up. “I have to get back to the bridge.”

  With a smile, Adrienne gently removed my hand from her shoulder.

  “Go on, then,” she said. “Be the captain, Cody Riggs.”

  -25-

  Hoon found a likely spot to set down a few hours later, but I vetoed it. I wanted to be farther away from our splashdown point in case the Lithos had something up their non-existent sleeves. They’d proven creative and tricky up until now and slipping silently away like a submarine of old seemed like a cheap and easy way to avoid trouble.

  I was glad I did. We’d gone about five hundred miles northward, a tenth of the way toward the pole and barely under the permanent ice, when shockwaves reached us.

  “What the hell was that?” Hansen snarled as he fought with his controls.

  “The Lithos, taking another shot at us,” I replied.

  “They’re bombing the ocean?”

  “If I were in their place, I would grab the nearest asteroids in planetary orbit and give them the right push to fall onto the moon, aiming where we splashed down and working outward. That’s why I wanted to get farther away and keep our signature low.”

  The realization that we’d all be dead if we’d gone to ground where we’d splashed down raised my stock in the eyes of the crew. I reminded myself that I couldn’t always be right. Even my legendary father had screwed up now and again. I just hoped when it came to be my turn it wouldn’t be a critical error.

  The bombardment continued for another day, but as we traveled farther and farther away, the shocks lessened.

  The Lithos had tried again, but failed to kill us.

  Had Hoon possessed hair, he would have been pulling it out. As it was, he complained bitterly about the huge amounts of sea life that was undoubtedly dying in our wake. If he hadn’t hated the Lithos before, he surely did now, which was fine by me. As my oceanic expert, I needed him at maximum motivation.

  We turned eastward and circumnavigated most of the way around the moon before turning north again. After ten long days, we found a perfect spot. With two hundred feet of permanent ice pack above us and a sea floor at a depth of three hundred feet, I couldn’t imagine anything detecting us. The only thing that could penetrate our cover was gravity and neutrinos. The ship didn’t have particle weapons, so there was no worry of neutrino emissions. We had nothing aboard like stardust, nothing dense enough to bend gravity. To be certain, we even kept all our gravity plates turned off. We effectively became ghosts.

  Conceivably, if the Lithos wanted us badly enough, they might be able to grab a really big asteroid, get it going fast and drop it on the moon. But we were now over six thousand miles from where we’d started. Unless the bombardment cracked the crust of the moon itself, I figured we’d survive.

  In the beginning, our construction plans were frustratingly slow. We used marines for short jaunts out onto the sea floor to grab boulders and nets full of what looked like coral along with all the animal and plant life that went with it. Hoon eagerly sorted through the loads, seizing specimens and popping them into buckets full of native seawater. The rest went into the factory to build specialized sea mining vehicles.

  For example, gills attachments for the battle armor extended their range a lot. The marines’ lasers had to be re-tuned to optimize them for water use, because they’d already encountered a few predators. We needed lots of high-pressure sealant to stop leaks. The list seemed endless, and Adrienne proved worth her weight in rare earths, coordinating all the things we needed as my logistics manager.

  I gave her two days to find her sea legs, so to speak, and then broached the topic I’d been thinking about over breakfast. I’d found that the first meal of the day when she was well rested and after she’d had her coffee was a good time to bring up risky subjects.

  “Looks like we’re doing all right on the mining efforts,” I opened.

  “The major things are done, and our raw materials are flowing in faster and faster. Why?”

  “It’s time to start making something we really need.”

  She stopped chewing, and then swallowed her bite of fake eggs. “Which is?”

  I heard a hint of challenge in her voice, which I found I liked, in small doses. “Parts for another factory. Getting two factories working will pay off big in the long run.”

  Adrienne put down her utensils to place her hands flat on the table and lean toward me. “That would take months. We’re running at capacity now. Half the production is going to extract fuel, crack oxygen, purify water, and make food for the crew. The other half is going to making special items for the sea environment. And, what about the rare elements? Those are hard to find, and we can’t make anothe
r factory without them. Astatine, lanthanum, erbium, neodymium…”

  “I can see you’re skeptical—”

  “No, Cody, I’m not skeptical. I’m telling you it isn’t practical. Not unless you plan to camp down here for a year or more altogether. I have a whole plan to get things done and you’re talking about disrupting it.”

  “How long would your current plan keep us here?” I asked.

  “A minimum of three weeks will set us up with a smooth-running operation.”

  “Too long,” I said, shaking my head. “If the Lithos are as single-minded as I believe they are, every day is precious. We have to push harder.”

  I knew I’d let the crew slack off for several days. Everyone needed a rest and some good sleep. But right now, I wanted to step things up a notch. “We’re going to have to go back to extended shifts,” I said.

  Her eyes widened. “Sixteen hours? That will burn people out. They’ll make mistakes.”

  “No, I was thinking twelve hours. Two shifts per day, rather than three.”

  She nodded, thinking it over.

  “I can do more,” she said. “I’ll get Hoon looking for the rare elements we need. Then we’ll streamline the raw material collection to something better than marines or loaders carrying in chunks. There’s too much down time in the process while stuff is loaded in, broken up, and so on.”

  I could see the wheels were turning in her head so I waited for her thoughts to finish.

  She leaned forward as if waking up. “What we need is some sort of sluice. A continuous feed, a conveyor belt that brings in material as fast as the factory can eat it. That way the labor and equipment stay outside, gathering, not wasting time carrying, hefting and shoving stuff into the processor.”