The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time)

by Moran, Daniel Keys

  “– because if you’re Gene Yovia, I am Nicaula, the Queen of Sheba.”

  Trent nodded. “You haven’t been down to Earth in over twenty years.”

  Ken looked startled – Trent guessed he’d expected more of a response from his accusation. “Too heavy,” Ken admitted after a beat. “I exercise in a full gee sometimes, but I wouldn’t care to live in it again.”

  “So what are you going to do, when the Unity’s complete? Not a lot of projects floating around out there, this size. They’re not going to take you with them into combat.”

  Ken leaned back, studying Trent. “I don’t have any plans, for a fact.”

  “Going to retire?”

  “Maybe. If nothing better comes along.”

  “What if,” Trent asked, “something better came along? Something that would take all the energy you could bring to it, for as long as you wanted to work, for the rest of your life? Ken, I’m not talking about something better than retirement: I’m talking about something better than anything you’ve ever done before, maybe something better than anything you’ve ever imagined doing.”

  “What happened to Gene?”

  Trent took a deep breath. “He’s on Mars. Working on something insanely great. You want to talk to him and learn more about what it is?”

  “WHAT WOULD YOU have done if he’d said no?”

  “Same thing,” Trent told Michelle Altaloma. “Drugged his bony old butt, and shipped him to Mars for the duration.”

  “HOW IS SUB-CHIEF Wilson?”

  “Sick, but getting better,” Trent said absently. “I checked in on him at his hotel before coming over. He’ll be back to duty tomorrow, possibly Saturday.”

  They sat together on the black tank-grown-leather couch in her living room, with the bay windows cleared. She’d rotated the house on its axis so that the large windows in the living room pointed toward the Unity.

  Through the window the sun, the Unity, Halfway, and the background of stars, all appeared to be rotating, as her house spun to provide gravity. Mostly Trent managed to watch it and see himself as fixed, and the view through the window as gently spinning, though it took enough of an effort that sometimes the truth settled in on him, and he felt that he was revolving about a point somewhere above his head.

  Since yesterday morning they’d been loading stasis bubbles, filled with metallic hydrogen at a pressure of nearly a thousand gigapascals, aboard the Unity. The stasis bubbles were over 20 meters in diameter; from the distance of Melissa’s house, they appeared as a string of small, perfectly reflective pearls, coming off the freighters that had brought them to the Unity, floating across nearly half a kilometer of space to the Unity – no ship was permitted to get any closer – with repetitive, quite graceful precision.

  “We had to reschedule his psychometric.”

  “I’m sure he appreciates it. You can’t possibly think he’s wrong.”

  “I don’t. It’s just that Commander Vance is due tomorrow,” Melissa said.

  “So I hear.”

  “He’s suspicious when things go badly … he’s suspicious when things go too well.” She sighed. “Of course, he’s suspicious when things go as expected.”

  “Perhaps we could just observe that he’s a suspicious man.”

  “We rescheduled your psychometric for the morning, before his arrival. I wanted to get that out of the way before you met the Commander.”

  “You again?”

  “No, I’ll be busy. One of the DataWatch programmers – possibly even one of yours – will be running it.”

  Melissa had turned down Trent’s offer of a martini; he sat and drank the one he’d made for himself, chilled to the point that water ice had formed on the sides of the glass. He sipped at it, drinking more quickly than the drink deserved; he was quite sure he wasn’t going to have time enough for a second.

  “You’re worried Trent has made it through your security.” It felt odd, speaking of himself in the third person.

  Melissa sat on the couch that faced the bay window, so tense that Trent could almost feel her vibrating. She spoke in short, clipped tones. “It doesn’t need to be Trent. It wasn’t Trent last time, when the bomb went off and lobotomized Monitor.”

  “Why do you suppose Vance gave you this job?”

  The question startled her enough to jolt her out of her tension. “What?”

  “I’ve wondered why he selected me – no, don’t protest. I know he made the final decision.” He took the last sip from his martini, put the glass on the floor beside him.

  “You’ve never met him. How would you know that about him?”

  “I guess well.” He got to his feet, stretching. He glanced at Melissa. “Why me? Why you? With the doubts you have, putting you into a spot like this at a time like this? I’m very good at what I do, I’m … an obvious choice, at one level. And things have gone well enough that Vance is suspicious about that. But I’m far from having been the only possible choice. Mohammed Vance,” said Trent, “put two people with terrible doubts about the Unity, in two of the most senior positions, and tasked them with delivering a project that was in real trouble.”

  “We have delivered.”

  Trent walked toward the bay window, looking out at the vacuum, at the string of bubbles with their load of metallic hydrogen. At that distance the line of mirrored bubbles barely seemed to move, second by second. “He couldn’t have known we would. What I think he did know, though, was that the SpaceFarers, Martians, Free Luna, Rebs, Claw … Trent,” he said with his back to her, “that between the badly organized lot of them, they’d absolutely make another try on the ship. Vance is convinced that someone is coming to try to halt the Unity. And in charge of security, he put you. And in charge of infosystems, me. I wouldn’t have put either of us into these positions: Vance put both of us. Why do you think he did that?”

  “Ahhhh.” It was a long sigh. “Certainment. Sure,” she said softly. “Of course he doesn’t trust me. But it’s hard to take personally. He doesn’t trust anyone.”

  “You do take it personally.”

  “He should trust me,” she said fiercely.

  He turned to face her, with the window at his back. “He knows your doubts. We’re long past the days where such things can be hidden. He also knows your quality, your competency. He’s much too smart to believe that a person with no doubts can be competent. So he walks a line with everyone, measures people to the gram, pictures everything in percentages and shades of gray.”

  “And he gambled on me,” said Melissa du Bois, “to see if I would attract Trent.”

  “Or someone like him. Someone like me, maybe.”

  Trent saw her battle computer engage. She turned to face him like an automaton, head rotating about before the rest of her came around, hands coming up, pink crystals on her fingertips flaring alight –

  “Wait!” Trent lifted his hands, palms outward. “Don’t shoot. I mean merely that I am ideologically suspect. It would … interest Vance … that you found that attractive.”

  The tips of her fingers didn’t cease glowing. “Are you going to fail your psychometric tomorrow, Gene?”

  Trent said, “I don’t think so.”

  “I can’t begin to tell you,” she said, “what a disaster it would be if you did. Prison is a probability. Execution would not be out of the question. Gene, I don’t just mean for you.”

  “I understand.”

  In the window behind him, the silent explosion was bright enough to throw Trent’s shadow across the room, across Melissa du Bois.

  From where Melissa stood, facing Trent, the explosion framed him, outlined him, with a nimbus like the halo of a saint.

  THEY TOOK HER shuttle back to the Unity.

  It was pressurized; nonetheless they both wore their pressure suits, helmets on, with the faceplates cracked open. If the pressure dropped abruptly, or sudden acceleration occurred, the faceplates would automatically seal themselves shut. They could be sealed manually as well, with the
touch of a finger, though that was a worst-case scenario; if the automated systems didn’t kick in for some reason, vacuum would render a human unconscious within ten to fifteen seconds. Melissa was more fortunate; any Elite could survive in a complete vacuum for two to three minutes.

  Trent could hear Melissa subvocalizing commands to her staff aboard the Unity; when he tried to speak to her, she waved him off. They’d covered half the distance to the Unity and had turned the shuttle over to decelerate before she spoke.

  “Two fuel bubbles exploded. Evacuation is proceeding. When we get to the Unity, you’ll join the evacuation.”

  “Taking me to the ship to evacuate me from it?”

  “No time to do anything else.”

  “Your enemies,” said Trent quietly, “assuming this isn’t an accident, will know your procedures. They’ll know you’re set to evacuate the ship for fear of a second blast.”

  “You’re suggesting we don’t evacuate?”

  “I’d guess that Mohammed Vance wouldn’t, if he were here.”

  “Maybe,” said Melissa, “you don’t guess that well after all. Because that was him I was just talking to. He came in a day ahead of schedule.” She was silent a moment, listening once again to something distant. “Never mind about the evacuation. You won’t be joining it. The Elite Commander is aboard the Unity now, and you’re about to meet him.”

  THEY DOCKED TOWARD the Unity’s nose and cycled through.

  Mohammed Vance had set up temporary offices in the forward observation deck. Trent knew that, on Vance’s previous visits, he’d also taken over that deck for his own use. Consistency, reliability, predictability; some days Trent very nearly loved Mohammed Vance.

  From the docking bay they used it was five minutes to the observation deck, pulling themselves along by the handholds mounted along the corridors. The moment they were aboard ship, Trent tapped into the data feed from Monitor. He shuffled through the security system, found the forward observation deck –

  Vance had seated himself, despite the lack of gravity, in one of the room’s many chairs. Trent recognized his aide instantly – Captain Adrian Hilè, a dark, precise man of middle years, wearing PKF dress blacks: like Vance and Melissa du Bois a member of the PKF Elite, who had served as Vance’s factotum and bodyguard since before the TriCentennial Rebellion. The third man Trent didn’t recognize – tall, a little taller than Hilè, a little shorter than Vance. Somewhere around thirty years of age. Gangly, obviously not an Elite. He didn’t strike Trent as obvious PKF officer material, either. Caucasian, brown-haired, brown eyes. Watching him, Trent made a guess, and the moment the thought crossed his mind, was sure he was correct: it was the model.

  Vance had brought the model with him. That was interesting.

  The adrenaline poured through Trent as he pulled and kicked his way down the corridors after Melissa. She was not obviously impatient with him, but she was five or ten meters ahead of him and not waiting.

  There was a really great chance he was going to be dead in the next few minutes.

  “I WISH YOU would reconsider,” Captain Hilè said. “We are none of us field operatives at this point. We should not be here. You should not be here.”

  Vance nodded. He wore his usual working attire, PKF combat fatigues. “Apparently the fuel bubbles exploded.”

  “They can’t do that,” said Jason Alexai Lucas. “It’s not one of the possible failure modes.”

  “Cannot,” said Mohammed Vance mildly, “is the wrong word to use, after the fact. Two of them did.”

  “I will repeat myself,” Hilè said, a bit stiffly. “We –”

  “Don’t,” Vance said.

  “Apparently Chief Yovia suggested that we not evacuate the ship?”

  “So Chief du Bois tells me. I will be interested to find out why.”

  Captain Hilè went silent for a moment. “Very well,” he said quietly, and then raised his voice. “I’m informed that we’ve locked down the ship. All civilians are off, most Space Force; within another fifteen minutes all Space Force will have been evacuated. There are 213 PKF officers still aboard ship. Counting you, myself, and Chief du Bois, there are nine Elite aboard ship.” He paused, listening. “PKF officers have been placed at choke points for internal transport. Monitor has been instructed to, ah, monitor, all movement within the ship and report the movements of any person or device from their assigned places.”

  The observation deck had two doors, aft and fore. The fore doorway curled opened, and Mohammed Vance looked up to see Melissa du Bois, and a man with Adam Selstrom’s face, float into the room.

  “THE REASON I suggested ceasing the evacuation,” Trent said, “was that it’s S.O.P. in the event of an explosion. It’s what you did last time. It’s what you do aboard any PKF ship that’s not under combat readiness, when a bomb has been identified, or has exploded. Your enemies aren’t stupid; they’d have seen this coming.”

  The model was staring at Trent with an almost physical intensity.

  “Indeed,” Mohammed Vance said. “Your enemies, you say.”

  That voice – hearing it in person again for the first time in over a decade sent a shiver through Trent that he was sure Vance caught. “I mean our enemies, of course.”

  “I am Mohammed Vance.”

  “I doubt there are many people in the entire System who wouldn’t know that,” said Trent. “It seemed to me –”

  “I believe I will take the lead in this conversation now, if you don’t mind,” Vance said mildly.

  “Sure,” Trent said. Hanging on near the fore doorway, Trent felt a tremor run through his handhold. Trent let go of the handhold, kicked over to where Vance and Hilè and the model were clustered together. Vance raised an eyebrow, but made no comment as Trent pulled himself into one of the seats facing Vance – a little more toward the back of the room than the front.

  Melissa didn’t move.

  Seated so closely to Vance, Trent became aware of the man’s raw physical presence – his sheer size, the animal vitality of him. He remembered the last time he’d been so close to Vance – Vance had actually frightened him. He wasn’t frightened now, he was pleased to find – but he’d had an entire decade to prepare for this moment.

  So, Trent considered, had Vance.

  A pair of PKF officers – armed, in combat fatigues – appeared in the still-open doorway behind Melissa. “Take up post,” Vance instructed them. “Chief du Bois, please close that door. My officers don’t need to hear this conversation.”

  “Yes, sir.” Melissa palmed the doorpad behind her, without looking at it. She had one foot hooked into a hold, Trent noted, prepared to move on a second’s notice.

  “No major damage has been reported,” Vance said calmly. “Two of the fuel bubbles exploded, which my man here – this is Jason Lucas, a webdancer on my staff; Jason, this is Chief Eugene Yovia, an even better programmer than yourself – Jason says this is not possible. So my working assumption is that this is enemy action. But the fact that it caused so little damage leads me to believe it’s a diversion. I did, of course, consider canceling the evacuation – but the only benefit to doing so would seem to accrue to the enemy. More people, more targets, more confusion, more opportunity to act unobserved. In the event that this is not the work of a particular person, it may be a double tap – an explosion intended to cause me to load the ship with high value PKF and Space Force targets, set to work repairing the damage from the explosion, so that a second attack can cause even more substantial damage.”

  Vance paused.

  “You don’t believe that,” said Trent.

  “No. We’ve simulated a variety of attacks upon the Unity; they are so difficult to execute that a second attack seems unlikely. The double tap scenario is not a high probability. Most likely this is what the enemy was capable of doing – and all they were capable of doing.”

  Many grams of pressure pushed Trent down into his seat.

  “Now,” Vance continued, “you entered this room and im
mediately told me why you’d suggested we reverse the evacuation. Your reasoning does not hold up, but more particularly of interest to me: you heard us speaking. Via Monitor and the surveillance devices within this room, I take it.”

  “Sure,” Trent agreed.

  “According to the code Monitor is supposed to be running on, it should not be able to transfer data regarding PKF operations to anyone, including you.”

  “Well, there are specifications,” Trent admitted, “and then there’s code. We’ll find this error and hammer it out.”

  A puzzled look crossed Melissa’s face.

  Hilè and Lucas, who had been floating in the air near Vance, some thirty centimeters above the deck, had floated down to the point where their feet nearly touched the deck.

  “I see,” Vance said after a moment. “Doubtless we will need to do a complete review of the specification, before the ship is put into service. Wouldn’t you think?”

  “Sure,” said Trent. Both of his feet were flat against the deck.

  Melissa du Bois stared at Trent.

  Vance leaned forward and Trent had to suppress an impulse to lean back. “Why do you suppose an attack, at this late date, would cause so little damage? What sort of person would mount such an attack?”

  “Someone who didn’t want to hurt anybody?” Trent said brightly. “Just guessing there.”

  Captain Hilè shook his head. Jason Lucas looked down at the deck, startled to find himself in contact with it.

  Mohammed Vance said, “Why would any rebel worry about the safety of patriotic citizens of the Unification?”

  “Oh, no,” said Melissa.

  “Because,” said Trent the Uncatchable, “Killing is wrong.”

  Mohammed Vance, still seated facing Trent, reached forward as Trent leaped backward.

  The old school laser in Vance’s fist lit, and so did the lasers on Captain Hilè’s fingers.

  Melissa du Bois shoved off from the wall facing Trent and came at him in a low dive.

  “Monitor,” Trent shouted in the instant before she struck him, “Wake up!”