Nova War

by Gary Gibson

  Corso stared out across the scene of ruin. He had a pretty good idea just what the Piri Reis was capable of when it came to defending itself, but it had no onboard weapons capable of causing this level of devastation.

  ‘You agreed to cooperate,’ Honeydew reminded him. ‘Now board the Piri Reis and retrieve the protocols.’

  ‘But. . . what about this?’ Corso asked, waving a hand towards the field of carnage. ‘What did this?’

  ‘That is something we would also like to know.’

  Corso turned to face the alien directly. ‘The Piri Reis doesn’t have any kind of offensive capabilities, and that’s a fact. You’ve been monitoring the ship, haven’t you? So this must be obvious to you?’

  ‘Yes, but our monitoring systems have been . . . unresponsive. All we can say for certain is that there have been sporadic surges of power to the field generators built into the supporting cradle.’

  ‘Okay’ Corso thought for a minute. ‘I’m assuming you did try turning the power supply to the cradle off?’

  The alien stared at him silently.

  For pity’s sake. ‘What, you can’t actually turn it off?’

  It didn’t take much for him to sense Dakota’s hand somewhere in all of this.

  ‘You made it clear that Merrick granted you override privileges that allow you to board her ship.’ The alien cast his gaze across the silent, darkened bay. ‘Our own attempts to do so have not met with success.’

  Corso gazed over the swathe of destruction before them and felt sweat prickle his brow. ‘Yes, but she’s not here. I tried boarding the ship without her direct permission once before, and it came very close to killing me. Maybe if you brought her here—’

  ‘That isn’t currently possible,’ came the bland synthesized reply. ‘You, however, are a noted expert in pre-Shoal electronic linguistics. You will board the Piri Reis, find the information we need, and thereby prove your worth to us.’

  ‘Everybody wants something from me,’ Corso sighed, half under his breath.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Corso snapped, feeling irritable. Would the Piri Reis still recognize him? Or would it find some way to kill him before he could even get near it?

  ‘In that case, time is of the essence, Mr Corso. Don’t wait too long before returning - or think about hiding inside the ship. If you do, we will not hesitate to destroy the Piri Reis, with you inside it if necessary’

  Corso stared into the alien’s implacable black eyes.

  Just get this over with. He stepped off the platform and walked slowly forward, eyes firmly fixed on the Piri Reis. After a dozen or so steps he stopped and turned to look back at the platform, and saw the three Bandati still standing there like giant-eyed statues, unmoving and implacable beyond the occasional involuntary twitch of their wings.

  He turned back to face the Piri, and started moving again, unable to keep himself from crouching slightly, as if to make a smaller target.

  Reaching the first group of corpses, he saw that their wings had been almost entirely burned away.

  The Piri sat only about fifteen or twenty metres ahead, drifting very slightly inside its field restraints. The constantly flickering light was too much like some cheap effect out of a haunted-house ‘viro for Corso’s comfort. He tried to remember what he’d seen of the Piri ’s internal systems layout, in case there was some clue there as to how it had managed to kill those heavily armed warriors.

  He stopped dead as a new thought occurred to him.

  Honeydew had mentioned unexplained power surges in the cradle’s field generators. That had to be it.

  Shaped-field generators could have short-range defensive uses. Normally, you needed ‘receiver’ devices that ‘contained’ the field, since otherwise it would dissipate almost as soon as it was created.

  But it was possible to create a small bubble without a receiver -a bubble that might be only a few centimetres across - and then shrink it rapidly in the fraction of a moment before it burst. If air molecules were trapped inside the field, they could be compressed hard and fast enough to form a white-hot plasma with explosive energy. And as soon as the tiny field-bubble containing that plasma dissolved . . .

  Corso gazed down at a blackened lump by his feet. It took a moment for him to realize he was looking at the blown-off head of a Bandati warrior. He felt a chill, thinking about what just one person could do with that much power - and that much reach, in being able to subvert computer systems at will from across an entire solar system.

  ‘Dakota?’ he whispered, feeling ridiculous at calling out the name of someone who, as far as he knew, was still sitting alone in a tower back on Ironbloom. But in that flickering half-light, surrounded by devastation and death, it was almost as if he could sense her presence all around him. He’d seen enough over the past few months not to make the mistake of taking anything for granted, any more.

  He received no reply, of course.

  He ventured another step forward, fresh sweat prickling his brow. He thought about picking up one of the abandoned weapons lying nearby, but then thought better of it. He was most of the way towards the Piri now, and had already noticed a faint hum emanating from the craft.

  Corso took a step closer, and heard the hum change in pitch. He froze in place, one foot half-raised, and waited to see what would happen. He could see the half-incinerated form of a dead Bandati just out of the corner of one eye.

  Now he noticed a faint hissing.

  He glanced downwards to see a thin line of black running precisely between the two bay doors situated directly under the Piri Reis. The Piri Reis had apparently crashed into the docking bay doors hard enough to compromise their integrity, and as a result air was slowly but perceptibly seeping out of the chamber.

  But how to get inside? Corso wondered. In through the main airlock, or around the side and then in through that hole in the hull?

  He stood there thinking about the various half-truths he’d told Honeydew.

  Strictly speaking, the Bandati didn’t need him at all. Oh, it was true he’d developed the protocols they - and everyone else -wanted so badly, and it was just as true that he was an expert in the extremely rarefied field of antediluvian Shoal programming languages. Yet the fact remained that it had been just plain dumb luck that Senator Arbenz’s researchers had stumbled across a veritable Rosetta Stone while making the first tentative explorations of a derelict starship. Once you had that, it wasn’t really much of a jump to figure out how to create the necessary protocols - at least, as long as you had a handy supply of experts to hand, like himself.

  That much, fortunately, Corso had kept from his captors. This way, at least, they needed him; this way they had a reason to let him live - until they had acquired what they wanted, at any rate. But he still had to give them something in the meantime: something that was only to be found inside the Piri Reis.

  He came right up to the hull of Dakota’s ship and slowly walked around one side, despite an overwhelming urge to turn tail and run. He did his best to ignore two part-exploded bodies that lay nearby.

  ‘Congratulations, Mr Corso.’

  Corso nearly shrieked when he heard Honeydew’s voice seemingly right behind his shoulder. He turned and saw the glowing bead of an interpreter hovering, unaccompanied, just a metre away. He hadn’t known they could do that.

  ‘You’ve done very well,’ said the Bandati’s disembodied voice. ‘Please continue.’

  ‘Don’t try that again,’ Corso muttered, his voice cracking. The bead hovered there without replying.

  ‘I mean it,’ he said a little louder. ‘If you follow me on board with that thing, I’ve got no idea how the Piri’s going to react. So get rid of it.’

  He waited a tense moment until the interpreter began to move back across the bay towards the figures waiting on the platform. Corso breathed a sigh of relief.

  He moved quickly along the side of the craft until he came to its primary airlock. There was a hiss, and the
door slid open. Corso pulled himself up and inside, and listened carefully.

  He could hear something creaking, through the inner door of the airlock, like metal straining against metal.

  ‘Piri?’ Corso called out, feeling more confident now. If Dakota’s ship had meant him any harm, he’d surely know it by now.

  He activated the airlock’s inner door and stepped through that, too. ‘Piri, it’s me, Lucas Corso. Can you hear me? I’m coming on board.’

  Nothing.

  ‘I still have Dakota’s authorization for command override, Piri,’ he said, a little louder this time.

  The inner airlock door swung shut behind him, in the best tradition of haunted-house ’viros. He peered into the gloom, and enjoyed a brief fantasy of taking control of the Piri, and using it to smash through the airlock doors and out to freedom.

  And how long before they tracked you down and shot you out of the sky? It had to remain a fantasy, nothing more.

  Even to Corso, his senses inured to the odour of his own unwashed skin after so many weeks of captivity, the interior of the Piri Reis stank to high heaven. There was garbage everywhere -bits of Dakota’s clothing, as well as food cartons with blackened remains still clinging to their insides. Patches of the fur that lined every wall and surface now looked shiny and greasy in the low-power emergency lighting.

  He moved carefully, all too aware that the ship’s interior was a paranoid’s wet dream. There were countermeasures secreted in every nook and cranny, all controlled by a central faux-intelligence that had been designed, from the ground up, to be overwhelmingly neurotic.

  He headed for a console and brought up its main interface, tapping at the screen while thinking hard. Okay, get the protocols. Then what?

  There they were, boldly displayed on the screen before him. Now just hand them over to the Bandati and wait for them to realize they didn’t require his services any more?

  Hardly.

  Corso gazed at the screen and frowned, trying to work out what it was that didn’t look right.

  He brought up base routines, studying what should have been hardwired algorithms meant to control how the spacecraft functioned, and all the while the lines on his face furrowed deeper. Wholesale alterations had been made to the Piri’s integral systems, and all within the past few weeks.

  The only person who could have done so was Dakota.

  He called up log-files and reviewed some of the changes, most of which turned out to involve the main AI functions. At first glance, it looked more like vandalism than anything else, for great chunks of the ship’s programming had been entirely rewritten.

  Except nothing he saw there made any sense to his skilled eyes.

  He thought of the Bandati waiting for him in the chamber outside, and wondered how much more time he had.

  Honeydew had claimed the derelict and the Piri Reis were somehow in direct communication with each other. That Dakota would have used the derelict as a secure relay in order to talk to the Piri made sense - and, based on what the Bandati had already told him, only Dakota could have been behind the slaughter of the Bandati lying outside its hull.

  But if the derelict itself was somehow responsible for these changes to the Piri, the question remained - why?

  He flipped back to the Piri’s altered base routines. It was a devilish piece of work, but a closer look revealed a certain order amongst the chaos. Every piece of spare circuitry on board the Piri had been put to the task of carrying some part of the ship’s mind, regardless of whether or not it had been designed for that purpose. Entire chunks of what remained had been reallocated all across the vessel’s data stacks.

  There was a recursive quality to what remained that made Corso wonder if he wasn’t looking at things in the wrong way. On a whim, he processed a few of the data chunks as graphics. What he got back was much more than he might reasonably have expected – swirling, organic patterns; constantly renewing Fibonacci-like visuals that filled the screen.

  Whatever was going on, it was clearly much more than just common sabotage.

  And then it came to him: a way to keep himself alive.

  The Piri’s data stacks were so badly scrambled it shouldn’t be hard for him to sabotage his own work there. He could keep some of what he’d developed and present it to the Bandati, but dump the rest and say it got scrambled during the flight from Nova Arctis. The ship had barely survived a nova, after all - so how could they expect otherwise?

  Given enough time, and access to the derelict, he could reconstruct the complete protocols. And stay alive in the meantime.

  There came a creaking noise from somewhere deeper within the ship. Corso froze, but heard nothing else except silence. He forced himself to relax. The ship had been badly hammered, after all, so it would be a lot more surprising if nothing shifted around from time to time, especially while the vessel was wobbling about between shaped fields.

  Then he heard the same sound again, uncomfortably like someone moving around in the rear of the spacecraft. Corso peered into the darkness and realized he was going to have to go and find out what it was, for the sake of calming his nerves as much as anything else.

  He finished downloading select fragments of the Magi protocols and flushed the rest. Then he stepped through to the rear of the main compartment, leaned down and peered through one of the narrow crawl-tubes that led through to the rear of the ship. He could see the entrance to Dakota’s private sleeping quarters, and another narrow passageway that led through to the rear cargo area and the engine bays.

  A shadow moved.

  This is ridiculous. I’m jumping at nothing.

  But there was only one way to be sure.

  He pulled himself along the narrow crawl-tube, and peered through towards where the engine bays were located, but saw nothing bar some light seeping in through the hull breach.

  A few moments later he found himself crammed up against a kitchen unit just next to the entrance to Dakota’s sleeping quarters. He heard the noise, again, as of something shifting. The emergency systems were still the only source of light, so what little he could see was bathed in a deep red that only enhanced the dark shadows.

  This is idiotic, he thought. There’s no one here. He squeezed into the sleeping quarters and looked around. The one narrow cot had broken loose of its foldaway latches, scattering bedclothes and yet more clothing across the cabin. He sat down on it, staring up at the ceiling.

  Just his imagination, clearly. He started to get up again—

  Someone in the corner of the cabin?

  Corso froze in a half-crouch over the cot, glancing towards a tall and narrow recess set into one wall, its interior filled with oiled machinery that glistened under the emergency lighting.

  He wouldn’t have noticed anything at all if a silhouette hadn’t suddenly emerged from the recess.

  The figure moved closer to him; man-shaped but not human, and he found himself gazing at the smooth, bland features and not-quite-convincing skin and musculature of a machine-effigy.

  His jaw flopped open as he realized what he was looking at. It’s a goddamn sex toy.

  The effigy moved towards the exit from Dakota’s sleeping quarters, metallic tubes extending from its spine back into the recess where it no doubt spent the majority of its existence. These tubes clearly prevented it from getting too far away from the recess that housed it.

  Except, of course, that it had moved to stand directly between him and the only way out of the cabin.

  ‘Dakota?’ asked the effigy, peering towards him.

  It was recognizably the Piri ’s voice. And, even though he felt sure this was only his imagination, Corso couldn’t help but detect a querulous, almost childlike quality to its tone.

  ‘No, Piri, it’s me,’ Corso replied, shifting to increase the gap between himself and the effigy. Why am I frightened of it? he reasoned. I didn’t expect to find it here, but it’s hardly anything to be terrified of. He glanced down at the effigy’s member hanging between its smoo
th flanks. What was particularly worrying was that it appeared no longer as flaccid as just a few moments before.

  ‘Dakota,’ the effigy repeated, and Corso considered making a dash past it for the exit, but he had no idea how swift or strong this machine was. It looked formidable.

  ‘Piri! It’s me, Lucas Corso. I just requested for permission to come aboard, remember?’

  ‘Yes. I remember. You are Lucas Corso.’

  ‘I have full systems access, Piri. Remember? Dakota gave it to me.’

  ‘Yes. No . . . please wait.’

  The machine paused as if indecisive, and Corso frowned. Who the hell ever heard of a forgetful AI? It wasn’t like they were truly intelligent anyway – the Piri’s core personality was a Turing engine, plain and simple, regardless of how sophisticated its responses could be.

  ‘Dakota has told me to tell you . . .’ The effigy paused in mid-sentence and ducked its head down to one side, pursing its lips and staring off into the darkness exactly like a human being trying to remember something hovering on the tip of his tongue.

  Suddenly, the effigy’s mouth grew slack and it drooped, and Corso saw his opportunity. He quickly slipped back through into the cockpit area and glanced towards the external monitors. A few shadowy figures had begun creeping closer and closer to the Piri – more armed Bandati.

  Corso rushed towards the airlock, realizing what was almost certainly going to occur. He felt the ship lurch violently around him just as he started to climb back down and into the bay. He lost his grip and hit the deck, hard.

  The Piri was shifting violently from side to side on its bed of shaped fields, humming ever more loudly.

  He groaned and clutched at the shoulder he’d landed on, and started to pull himself upright. The Bandati warriors had seen him and were moving towards him tangentially, staying close to the far wall of the bay and moving around to one side of the Piri Reis.

  ‘Stop! Go back!’ he yelled, appalled. Were they stupidly trying to rescue him?

  The Piri rocked again, so violently that the underside of its hull banged hard against one side of its supporting cradle.