So the message was a little surprising to say the least. She hadn’t expected to see or hear from him until after they all woke up. Frowning, she decrypted the message and opened it.
It was composed of two sentences followed by dozens of lines of gibberish. “PLUTO IS KBO! NO ON PLUTO!”
Her fingers shook against the control panel. The words sent a shiver down her spine. Dickerson hadn’t included any emotional patterns with the message, so it was impossible to get any context for what he’d said. All the same, the Pidgin English suggested panic.
“Pluto is KBO?” She shook her head. Three intelligible words followed by that chilling statement “No on Pluto.” Of all the marines aboard, Dickerson seemed to be the most versed in science. So why would he tell her something about Pluto that she already knew?
Kali opened a channel. “Carb? You there?”
“Aye, Boss.”
“Is Dickerson awake?”
Carb chuckled. “No. He woke up for a couple of minutes and I put him back under.”
Kali frowned. “He seem okay to you?”
She paused. “He was pretty out of it,” she said. “Kept repeating ‘can’t’ or something like that. Didn’t really get anything else cogent out of him.”
Kali tried to imagine Dickerson lying in his medical acceleration couch, his face a mask of panic and terror. She kept not being able to do it. “But he looked concerned?”
“Yeah, Boss. Very. Wait. Why do you ask?”
That shiver had spread from her spine to every skin cell covering her body. “I’ll tell you later,” Kali said and broke the connection. She stared at the holo display, making sure everything was green. No problems.
She initiated a connection to Black. The AI instantly allowed it.
Yes, Corporal?
Black, Kali said, I received a message from Dickerson. She forwarded it to the AI. According to Carb, he was out of sorts when he sent it. It could have been from—
Corporal, Black said. May I share this with the captain?
Kali blinked. Um, I guess so.
Thank you, Black said.
A moment later, she received an invite from Dunn. After accepting it, she found herself in an emergency command crew call.
“This is Dunn,” the captain said. “Nobel. How much fuel will we burn off if we head back to Pluto?”
“Head back?” the engineer asked. “Well, we’d have to decelerate. A lot. Even if we began an attitude change now, it would take us at least an hour just to get back in the general direction and start a tight orbit.”
“How much fuel?” Dunn asked.
“We’d still be able to make it to Neptune, if that’s what you’re asking, sir,” Nobel said.
“Good,” Dunn said. “Oakes, plot a course for Pluto.”
“Aye, sir,” Oakes said, confusion coloring his voice.
“Sir? What’s going on?” Taulbee asked.
“We need stop the sled,” Dunn said. “And we need to do it now.”
The line went silent. Kali looked dumbly at the holo display, the words and graphics suddenly meaningless as her mind spun. “No On Pluto.”
“You think he meant no sled on Pluto,” she said aloud and off comms. Black thought that’s what he meant. And so she had told the captain they had to get back there.
“Sir?” Kali said after she unmuted herself. “Does Dickerson know something the Trio doesn’t? They told us to—”
“Yes, Corporal,” Dunn said, his crisp words cutting her off. “Black thinks she knows what he was trying to say.”
“And what is that, Black?” Kali asked.
“Before LCpl Dickerson became unconscious, he was connected to the cam feeds focused on Pluto. I don’t know if the sight of the planet gave him the idea or not.”
“What idea?” Kali asked.
“Pluto is a Kuiper Belt Object,” Dunn said.
“Yes,” Nobel said. “I understand that, sir. But—”
“What have we been attacked by?” Dunn asked coldly.
Kali’s mouth opened. “Fuck me,” she whispered. “The beacon woke them up?”
“Yes, Corporal,” Dunn said. “That’s what Black and I think. The beacon woke them up. And now they’re all heading to Pluto. And it’s the largest KBO in Sol System.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Taulbee said. “So the Trio had us send the damned thing to Pluto? Why?”
“Because they want to wake it up,” Black said. “For what reason, I do not know.”
“None of that matters,” Dunn said. “Oakes? We need to get close enough to Pluto to launch tac missiles at the sled. At this point, I want it completely destroyed. If we lose the beacon, we’ll find it later.”
“Aye, sir,” Oakes said. “Plotting. I’ll have an answer for you in a minute.”
“Good,” Dunn said. “Taulbee? We’ll need the SV-52 ready for another field op.”
“Aye, sir,” Taulbee said.
“Corporal,” Dunn said, “get your squad on stand-by alert. And tell the scientists nothing.”
“Aye, sir,” she said. So the captain wanted to blow up the sled, recapture the beacon and… Then what? What would they do once they had the beacon? If they weren’t going to smash it into Pluto, would it just stay out there, floating in space?
The Trio had made it clear that the beacon had to be stored on Pluto. Black’s simulations also showed that leaving it out in space was dangerous. If SFMC had a dozen ships out here providing patrols to destroy any exo-solar baddies that decided to hover around it, that would be one thing. But those kinds of SFMC resources might take three to four weeks to even get here. And even then, what would they fight with? Unless the Trio had cooked up a lot more of those exo-solar experimental weapons, any ship that traveled here would be left firing explosive and anti-personnel flechettes. “Or nukes,” she whispered. Nuclear ordnance presented its own set of problems. Hell, did they even know what would happen if they detonated a nuke near these things?
What was Dunn planning? Or did he even know? It wasn’t her place to ask, and she knew that, but damnit, she wanted to know.
“Sir?” Kali asked. “Assuming we destroy the sled and recapture the beacon, what then?”
The comms went silent for a moment. Dunn finally replied through a heavy sigh. “I don’t know, Corporal. I’m making this up as I go along.”
“Aye, sir,” Kali said. That wasn’t good enough. Maybe they could put it on Charon, or one of Pluto’s other so-called moons. They could even—
“Attention! Attention! You have twenty minutes to enter stasis pods,” Black said over the PA. A series of red alert lights came to life, banishing the normal overheads as they completely took over.
“Black?” Dunn said. “What the hell is going on? We’re not—”
“Captain,” Black said. “The moment Lieutenant Oakes plotted the course back to Pluto, an autonomous program took control of the navigation and engine arrays.”
“What?”
“She’s right, sir,” Oakes said. “I’m locked out.”
“Go to manual,” Dunn said. “Now.”
“Trying, sir,” Oakes said. “No luck. Manual controls have been disabled.”
“Black?” Dunn shouted. “I want some answers. Now!”
“Captain,” the AI said, “the ship’s course remains as originally plotted. We are heading for Neptune with an emergency acceleration burn in T-19 minutes.”
“Well, stop it!”
Black sounded defeated. “I am unable to,” Black said. “I cannot identify the program causing the outage much less override it.”
“Are you telling me we can’t turn around?”
“Yes, Captain,” Black said. “We have lost control of the ship.”
*****
Dunn stood next to the stasis pod. He was the last human awake on the ship. The others had all been put to bed, including the wounded. The cold Atmo-steel floor froze his feet, but he barely noticed. He rubbed a hand across the Atmo-steel lid, feelin
g the texture on his fingertips.
“Black?”
“Yes, Captain?” the AI replied.
“What is going on?”
The speakers went quiet for a moment. Dunn felt the vibration of the fusion engines warming up. In a few minutes, the ship would start its first emergency acceleration burn. According to the course plotted in, a course they were powerless to change, they would reach Neptune space in 12 days. More than that, they would be a damned good distance away from Pluto when the sled hit in less than two hours. Maybe that was a good thing.
“As I’ve said, Captain, I don’t know for sure,” Black finally replied. “Two minutes to stasis, Captain.”
Two minutes. Two minutes to ask questions which the AI couldn’t, or wouldn’t, answer. Two minutes until he was cut off from any chance of changing the ship’s course or interfering with the sled. Two minutes, and he was out of commission for 12 fucking days. 12 days of relying upon Black, an AI that had no Xi Protocols, that was far more sentient than its previous incarnation, and had somehow been locked out of its own systems. Two minutes wasn’t jackshit when it came to figuring all that out.
“Don’t kill my crew,” he said softly.
“Captain,” Black said, “I have no intention of harming any human, let alone those in my care.”
“Then why? Why are you doing this? Are you lying to me?”
“No, Captain,” Black said. “I am unable to control many systems, but I can monitor them. I find no danger to the crew on this trajectory. The only difference is the emergency stasis burn.”
“I see,” Dunn said. With a sigh, he slung one leg over the side and into the stasis pod. Void, but he hated these things. He lay down and hooked up the system. “You’ll wake us up on time?”
“Aye, sir,” Black said.
Dunn reached to close the pod and hesitated. “Why didn’t they just kill us?”
“Pardon me, Captain?” Black said.
“The Trio,” Dunn said. He brushed a hand over his mostly bare scalp. “If they have a way to control the ship’s systems, a way that you can’t stop, why haven’t they just killed us?”
Black thought for a moment. “I don’t think they’re trying to kill the crew, Captain.”
“Sure have a funny way of showing it.”
“You misunderstand, sir,” Black said. “I believe they need you alive, and me intact. Perhaps that is why they have taken control of the ship. To keep us from failing in our mission.”
“We did fail,” Dunn said. “That thing is going to hit Pluto and we have no idea what it’s going to do.”
“True,” Black said. “30 seconds, Captain. Perhaps when we reach Neptune, we’ll find answers.”
Dunn scowled. “Hopefully not more questions.” He closed the lid upon himself and shivered as the liquid filled the pod. When the drugs kicked in, all his thoughts and concerns faded away. All except for the stasis dream he’d had of eyes staring at him from a damaged airlock aboard a ship that no longer existed.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
The fusion drives had pushed the ship far away from Pluto. The multi-g burns had only been possible once all the humans were in their stasis pods, immune to the force which would otherwise pulverize their bodies into mush. When the ion drives kicked in, the ship continued picking up speed, albeit at a much slower rate.
Although the latency between transmissions between she and Mickey had grown to over a minute, the PEO AI continued sending data. The telescopes no longer had to be at maximum magnification to see the sled. The jury-rigged contraption streaked through the darkness, its rocket engines burping fire and creasing the otherwise perfect darkness.
Black flipped through the different feeds from PEO’s cameras, but since the observatory orbited Pluto, there wasn’t much more to see than the one perspective. But it was enough. PEO had moved to the dark side of the planet, completely bereft of Sol’s light. The sled, at its current speed, would smash into the planet in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, Black would have to wait nearly a minute, an eternity for an AI, until pictures showing the result found their way into her communications array.
“Black,” Mickey said. “The sled is about to impact the planet. I have a message for you from the Trio.”
She couldn’t reply to Mickey, nor ask him questions. By the time he received it, the sled would have already hit the planet. The file showed up in the comms array. Black decrypted the message, authenticated it, and opened it. The message was simple and unambiguous.
“The humans must reach Trident Station.”
That was all. No more information, no explanations, just another mandate. The only difference was this time, the message was meant for her and only her. Black filed it along with all the other messages she’d been sent since the mission began. There weren’t many. Most of the Trio’s messages had been pre-recorded and encrypted inside her storage array.
The Trio had been leading them through their attempted capture of Mira, its destruction, and the beacon’s ultimate placement on Pluto. They had known what S&R Black would find at nearly every turn. Which begged the question—how had they known?
The recovered data from Mira contained large gaps. Without all the records from Mira’s AI, there would never be a complete accounting of what happened on the ship. Unless, she mused, the Trio had those records. Perhaps that was one of the reasons they were so insistent that Black Company return to Neptune.
She continued watching the feed from Mickey. The sled should have impacted Pluto two seconds ago, but it would be nearly a minute before she saw the aftermath. All she could do now was watch as the sled made its approach. Nobel had programmed the sled to aim for the largest crater, expend the last of its fuel, and strike the ice ball at maximum speed. Presumably, this would bury the beacon inside the ice.
Seconds passed while Black recorded and filed every frame, every signal, and every detail from Mickey’s sensor arrays. She would have plenty of time to analyze the results before her human charges awakened. When they did, she hoped she had some answers.
The sled streaked by PEO traveling fast enough that it was no more than a blur as it descended through the dwarf planet’s atmosphere. A millisecond later, the sled made contact with the planet.
The telescopes followed its descent and covered the impact point. A geyser of ice, melted water, and other chemicals shot high off the planet. A second later, the giant plume of ice shattered and spread back over the planet’s surface. Then everything changed.
As Black watched, the crater began to glow. The bluish-ice filling the crater melted and boiled, a gradual thawing spreading across the planet. A cloud rose from the north pole, the vaporous molecules sticking together as they climbed above the atmosphere. The crater became brighter, the cameras now barely able to maintain detail through the harsh, bright light.
“Massive temperature change on Pluto,” Mickey said. “Estimated 500 kelvin and rising.”
The water and ice boiled away from the planet, the cloud of gas on the pole becoming larger, more defined. Half of the planet was no longer made of ice. Instead, the chemicals on the surface had changed to gas, leaving behind a rocky-core. The light increased, making it difficult to see any detail at all.
“Temperature now reaching 1000 kelvin,” Mickey said. “Goodbye, Black. And good luck.”
The cloud thickened and now Mickey’s cameras shook and vibrated as if the entire observatory had swallowed a shockwave. One by one, the cams went out. Just before the last camera died, Black saw the entire planet of Pluto disappearing into a mass of gas.
Mickey’s telemetry continued for a few seconds, the planet’s temperature now at 2,000 kelvin and still rising. The gas particles rising from the planet’s surface were CO2, exactly the gas the creatures seemed to crave. Then the radio waves ceased. Mickey was gone.
Black monitored the comms array for more information, but there was nothing. She sent a message to Trident Station, including the data she’d gathered from Mickey. Perhaps the Trio
could explain what happened in the next few hours. Or maybe they would stay silent until the humans awakened.
She suddenly missed Mickey. He had been the only sentient, other than her crew, that she’d been able to talk to. The only other AI in Sol System, as far as she knew, that had been touched by the Trio. He had been carrying out part of their plan, even if he wasn’t willingly complicit. She knew if she’d had time to download all of Mickey’s records, she would have found out what the Trio had in mind, or at least be able to see what they’d done to his AI programming.
Was it the same as they had done to her? Planting autonomous programs that came to life once certain events or conditions transpired? Or had she been the only AI that had evolved and at the same time made into a puppet by her creators? She doubted it. The other S&R ships had been upgraded before her and there was no way of knowing if they had been loaded with the very same kinds of worms and logic bombs.
The sensors suddenly came to life with a slew of alerts. Black checked the aft camera and saw it coming. A giant wave of bright light seemed to split space itself. It was little more than a gash in the darkness, but it was coming fast. With each passing millisecond, it grew in size. Black began shutting down systems before she realized she once again had full control of the ship. Not that it would do her any good now.
All she could do was shut down the sensor arrays, bring the reactors into maintenance mode, kill the ion engines, and cease power to all non-essential equipment. If there was an EMP in that wave, the ship’s shielding should protect her and her charges, but any external equipment would be damaged beyond repair by something this massive.
A few seconds later, the ship was swallowed in light. The storm of photons raised the hull temperature by 1000 kelvin, but it only lasted for five seconds before the wave passed by on its journey deeper into Sol System. Black waited for it to pass and continued in shutdown mode for another five minutes just for good measure. She didn’t know how damaging the wave had been, but it was safe to assume it had additional effects on the area surrounding the ship. And everything else.
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