Artificial Evolution

by Joseph R. Lallo

  Michella looked at the little creature. Squee looked up at her, scratching at her ear with a paw.

  “… Give me the baggie. We’ll call Squee Plan B.”

  Lex shook his head slowly, a grin on his face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The fact that we have a backup plan for if the camera hiccups, but not if the self-replicating robot countermeasure fails? That’s crazy. The fact that the camera backup plan involves downloading the brain of a house pet? That’s crazier. The fact that every last detail of this situation makes perfect sense to me? That’s the craziest thing of all. Come on. Let’s get out of here before anything else starts to make sense.”

  #

  Garotte crumpled up an empty applesauce tube and stowed it in the waste receptacle. He had not been the one responsible for stocking the Declaration’s emergency provisions, and thus had been subsisting on food of Silo’s choosing.

  “That woman’s predilection to all things apple is bordering on obsession,” he said as he eyed the assortment of green-apple-, candy-apple-, caramel-apple-, and sour-apple-themed foods remaining to be eaten.

  With communication and navigation completely down, Garotte’s primary function in orbit had been to keep an eye on the capital ship and the drones to make sure they didn’t make any sudden moves. The cloaking device had fortunately been behaving itself, no doubt in large part thanks to the fact he’d not been pushing the ship very hard. He was just contemplating opening a sour-apple energy bar as dessert when an array of indicators on the control panel began to illuminate. He looked over them.

  “Ship entering the system,” he muttered. “Gravitational indicator… quite high.” He squinted at the indicator. “That’s… worrying.”

  He tapped the coordinates of the sensor blip into his visual scanner and gave it a look. There was certainly a ship approaching. It was barely visible, but even at this distance the power readings were off the charts. Its weight put it closer to a space station than a ship, and the amount of thrust it was pouring into bringing itself to a stop was enough to move half a fleet. There was no doubt in his mind that it was one of the long-awaited doomsday weapons. Considering how long he’d delayed its arrival, it seemed likely they wouldn’t wait long before putting it to work. He looked over his weapons, then looked over the shield estimates on his combat computer. He could fire all day and not knock off a percent of the defenses on that thing. And that was ignoring the fact a constellation of other sensor blips implied it had at least a drone accompaniment of its own, if not a manned escort.

  Garotte flipped through the options available. If he didn’t do something brilliant in the next few minutes, his friend and collaborator, along with the entire population of the planet, would be reduced to carbon-scarring on the bedrock.

  “Well then… this isn’t likely to be pleasant.”

  Chapter 26

  Michella slept in the SOB’s passenger seat as Lex watched the indicators on the console. Just a few more minutes and he’d be in range of Movi. Squee was perched across his shoulders, her tail wrapped lightly under his chin to keep her from drifting away. She stared at the complex control panel, matching Lex’s gaze as though trying to work out what was so fascinating to him. He dabbed at his temple.

  “I’ve got to hand it to Ma and Karter. Whatever those coolers were that they added, they kept the heat down for a good long while. It’s only just starting to get warm in here, huh, Squee?” he said, scratching her chin. The console began to quietly chirp. “That’s the two-minute warning. We’re about to reach Movi.” He took a steadying breath. “Hey, Mitch!”

  She jolted awake. “Huh? What? Are we almost there?”

  “Two minutes. Are you strapped in good? Nothing floating around that might smash into my head at a crucial moment?” he asked.

  Michella looked around her and snatched a few errant wrappers and containers, stowing them beneath elastic straps and nets on the side of her chair. “We’re good.”

  “Take Squee. This could be a rough one.” He tugged Squee from his neck and passed her back, then cinched his restraints a little tighter.

  “Nothing you can’t handle,” Michella said. “Just make sure every camera, every recorder, every sensor this ship has is on maximum. I want there to be a record of this, every second of it, with crystal clarity.”

  “We’re going to be violating a quarantine for the second time. Heavily armed gunships might be shooting at us. You really think you’ll be able to use any of it without getting us locked up for… whatever it is people get locked up for when they do that?”

  “You’d be surprised what a little editing can do.”

  “Isn’t that a little disingenuous?”

  “I said we’d be showing people the truth. I didn’t say we’d be showing them everything.”

  He shrugged. “You’re the journalist. Now here’s the game plan. There’s going to be zero radio traffic. No warnings, no markers. Nothing. And we’re not going to have anything even resembling the element of surprise, because the SOB has been running at full tilt. It is going to be a bright red dot on even the weakest heat sensors. It’s going to be a dogfight from the moment they notice us until they lose their nerve and stop following us into the atmosphere. From there we’re going to head for Gloria and power up the radio to try to contact Garotte and Silo and tell them the plan, and to attract as many of those things as we can. Then we lead them someplace out of the way, drop our load, and pray that everything works the way we’d planned.”

  “How do we let the orbital ships know if and when the robots are wiped out?”

  “I’m hoping they’ll figure it out on their own. If not, you’re pretty persuasive, aren’t you?”

  “My relationship with the armed forces right now isn’t the strongest it’s been.”

  “Well, then now would be a great time to start patching things up.” He looked to the indicator. “Fifteen seconds.” He unwrapped a stick of gum and loaded it up, then shrugged and threw in a second one. As the indicator started ticking down to zero and the space around the ship shifted into visibility, he put his hands on the controls, game face firmly in place. “Time for the show.”

  The SOB dropped into conventional speeds, and Lex fought the urge to make a beeline for the planet. There were a handful of things within a star system that could look like a ship if all you had to go on were heat signatures. Satellites knocked out of orbit. Asteroids that had close calls with stars or planets, things of that sort. The longer he behaved like one of those, the longer he could avoid dodging rockets. A few gentle nudges of the thrusters moved him into an orbit that, without too much of a stretch, could appear to be a hunk of wandering space rock. He cut his engines and hoped they would fall for if for a while.

  The stillness was eerie. Outside his windows the pale dot of the planet and the piercing yellow glare of the star washed out the rest of the stars. He could hear Michella’s breathing, the calm half pant of Squee, and the low thrum of the SOB’s reactor waiting to be called to duty again. Lex flicked on the passive sensor overlay, and the computer painted orange circles around other ships. Dozens of them. Large clusters around a large capital ship, smaller clusters scattered elsewhere, the lot of them orbiting near the equator. Almost hidden around the curve of the planet was a larger ship of unfamiliar design.

  He chewed slowly on his gum, eyes scrutinizing the ships’ subtle motions. Sure enough, they were in a complete communication blackout. Even the VectorCorp background transmissions were silent. One ship peeled off from the rest… then another. Slowly they pulled into a loose formation. The navigation system added a dotted line to indicate what Lex had known from the first pixel of motion in the maneuver. They were on an intercept course.

  “We’re made. Hold on.”

  He punched the throttle, and the SOB roared to life, filling the cockpit with the soundtrack to a thousand such runs. It was the throaty rhythm of Karter’s monster of a reactor driving an equally monstrous set of engines harder than
anything the military had in their arsenal. Lex, Ma, and Squee were pinned back as the ship accelerated. Ahead, the ships juiced their engines as well.

  “Attention. Flash code detected.” The SOB’s control system stated.

  “Flash code?” Michella said.

  “They’re trying to communicate with exterior lights.”

  A small section of the lower right corner of the navigational overlay displayed a square of magnified visuals, showing a speedy military scout ship flashing a steady pattern. It was far too small to have a pilot. Likewise for the others. They were using drones. He smiled. At least that meant if he had to, he could fight back with a clear conscience. The lights continued to flash. Across the top of the overlay, a message scrolled: COMPLETE QUARANTINE IN PLACE. POWER DOWN ENGINES AND PREPARE TO BE TRACTORED INTO CUSTODY.

  “No thanks.” He angled toward the center of the formation and pushed the engines harder. A half-second later the alarm tone rang out.

  “Missile lock detected.”

  He quickly flipped the ship to offensive mode.

  “Autotarget missiles,” he ordered.

  Three red diamonds appeared on his display moving quickly toward him, while a few more drones formed up and joined them. He held his course. If there was one thing he’d learned from his worryingly large number of encounters with missiles, they weren’t the best at quickly changing direction. Typical ships weren’t great at it either, but the SOB wasn’t a typical ship. You can’t win a game of chicken against a missile, but if you time it right, you can come out on top if you choose the right time to chicken out. As an added bonus, a properly programmed drone wouldn’t fire on a target that was already tracked by a salvo of missiles. The longer he played this out, the longer he could avoid worrying about more missiles to dodge.

  “Missile lock detected. Missile lock detected. Missile lock detected,” the SOB announced.

  “What?” he said, eyes opening as his screen filled with at least a dozen red diamonds. “They’re not supposed to do that!”

  He pulled hard to the left—a few moments later than he should have. The SOB pitched aside, out of the path of the first missile trio, and the weaponized tractor beam detonated one as it went by. Because of his less than perfect timing, the explosion hit his shields with a punch and knocked them down 20 percent, but he was whole. The two surviving missiles began their long curve around to pursue. Now he had two missiles behind him and too many in front of him.

  “Missile lock detected.”

  “Why do they keep firing!?” Lex yelped. He angled the SOB hard and flared the engines, bouncing out of the predicted trajectory and dodging a cluster of missiles.

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Because they—” He made another razor-sharp dodge, this one bringing him near enough for his tractor to pop two more rockets and spray him with enough shrapnel to knock the shields down to 50 percent. “They aren’t supposed to waste ammo on previously—” Another dodge. Half of the rockets were behind him now, and the first set were finished with their turn and were gaining. “Painted targets.”

  “How would they know?” Michella said.

  “They coordinate over… Oh no… They’re obeying communication quarantine protocol… They’re just going to keep shooting.”

  He gritted his teeth. Strategy was out the window now. This was an obstacle course that was getting denser with hazards by the minute. He swung his course back toward the first set of drones. The display readout tracked fifteen separate missile locks, but Lex had a feeling that was just the max it could do, because his mental tally was closer to two dozen announcements. Which meant there were at least nine missiles he couldn’t see.

  “Ship collision imminent,” the SOB warned.

  “That’s the idea,” Lex said, his eyes flicking to the missile lock ranges. At his current speed, the lead missile would hit in nine seconds, and dodging a missile on your tail was an entirely different beast. It would be able to adjust to any dodge and keep after him.

  The first of three drones grew larger ahead of him, close enough for him to read the registration number painted on the hull. He barely feathered the controls. The SOB smashed hard into the drone’s shields, knocking it off course and bouncing the SOB to a new heading like a billiard ball, allowing for a much sharper turn than the engines would have allowed at the expense of about half of his remaining shields.

  “Come on, come on,” Lex said, watching the rear indicators. “No radio means those things are tracking heat.”

  Five missiles whipped by the drone, remaining fixated on Lex. Then the drone flared its engines to pursue him, and the nearest missiles suddenly found the fresh source of heat to be far more enticing. Two of them diverted and hit their new target, wiping out the drone. Lex dodged two more salvos of missiles and set course for the next drone, hoping to pull the same stunt again, but the lead missile was closer to him than he was to the drone.

  His brain started wildly pitching ideas, dredging up every piece of information available and throwing it at him at once in hopes of a precious piece of insight sticking. He swept his eyes across the console, the galaxy of warning indicators blurring together until one strange thing caught his eye, an option that he’d never seen on his command list before. “Jettison ACS.” The cryoshunts. Two gadgets affixed to his ship that had been drinking up his excess heat for the last few hours until they’d had their fill. Two red-hot hunks of electronics ready to be shrugged off. In situations such as this, there was a name for things like that. Decoys.

  He tapped the command and jettisoned the first ACS. It fell away from the ship. Instantly the half-dozen nearest missiles shifted to follow, and shortly afterward made contact. This illustrated a key difference between the ACS and a proper decoy. First, a proper decoy is launched away from its ship, rather than continuing along in the same direction. This minor detail meant that the detonations were very close to the SOB, and revealed another tidbit of information that Lex’s split second Hail Mary of a plan hadn’t considered. Six missiles exploding at the same time packed considerably more punch than, say, one missile. He wasn’t sure what the ACS was made of, but it added a pretty blue color and a lot of force to the explosion as well. The combined blast hit the SOB hard and put out a dense cloud of shrapnel.

  The ship lurched to the side, and Michella barely suppressed a startled cry. The control panel blacked out, silencing the warning buzzers and depriving Lex of the many handy visual aids that had thus far kept him from dying. After a fraction of a second that took years off his life, the systems blinked back on.

  “Primary shield failure,” the SOB said. “Secondary shields at forty percent.”

  “Could be worse,” he muttered.

  The system insisted the missile count was still at fifteen, but the aftermath of the blast popped two more of those in pursuit, dropping it to… nope, still fifteen. He’d have to talk to Karter about an upgrade on that.

  The missiles started to gain again, and a fresh batch were on the way from ahead now. He glanced at the much larger shape of the planet Movi. He’d reach it soon, but not soon enough. One more ACS left. He’d have to make it count. He eyed the nearest cluster of pursuit missiles and counted off in his head. When the moment seemed right, he gave the control stick a gentle waggle and simultaneously released the ACS. It flicked off at an odd angle, drawing away another swath of missiles that detonated far enough away to only shave a few more percent off his remaining shields. The seven missiles exploded, starting a chain reaction that eliminated four more, and the missile lock count dropped from fifteen to fifteen. He was beginning to question the value of that particular statistic.

  Most of the drones were behind him, and the bulk of the missiles on his tail were more than thirty seconds away, but the planet was more than a minute away. This didn’t bode well.

  “We’re out of counter measures, and we’ve got nothing to hide behind,” Lex said.

  “What does that mean for us?”

  “Nothing
good.”

  Again he scoured the console for options. Thirty-three seconds to missile strike. Five collision threats in forward trajectory…

  “Hang on. Gotta borrow some defense.”

  He guided the ship toward the capital ship ahead. His computer told him he’d collide with it in forty-four seconds. Too much time. He had to even the odds a bit. With a dance of button presses and steering maneuvers, he spun the ship and cut engines, facing the pursuing missiles and sliding along backward. The retro thrusters took over as the primary propulsion, and didn’t do a particularly good job of it, but now he had a clear view on the pursuing missiles, and the targeting system had a better angle and range to pick them off.

  “We’re supposed to be going backward, right?” Michella said with urgency. She was leaning aside, holding Squee close to her face and eyeing the cluster of missile indicators with great concern.

  “Navigating with reversed controls isn’t so easy, so we’re going to put a hold on the commentary,” Lex said.

  He flicked his eyes back and forth between cockpit windows and the navigation screens. The tractor beam picked off three of the closest missiles, and to his own surprise he managed to dodge three more coming from ahead, or behind, depending on the perspective.

  “Defensive weapon signatures detected,” the system announced.

  “About time!” he said.

  Ahead, the missiles looked like they were losing interest, the cluster widening and drifting down and to the left.

  “What’s going on?” Michella asked.

  “Ship-to-ship collision imminent,” the system said.

  Lex spun the ship around to reveal the capital ship dead ahead. It was huge, shaped a bit like a complex metallic whale and large enough to have a few ships the size of the SOB in its docking bay. A blue overlay on to the cockpit window visualized the energy shields of the massive warship, but it was hardly necessary. He was close enough to be literally skimming the shields with his, causing a rippling gold shimmer beneath the ship, like a wake without an ocean. Enticed by the now much more substantial heat signature of the capital ship, the missiles began splashing down against the shield, bursting against it with little effect. He fired retrorockets to cut his speed and continued to skim the shields of the ship, spiraling around it. The tight downward curve of their flight began to lift them from their seats, straining against the restraints.