Tiago and the Masterless (Interrogative Book 1)

by Charles Barouch

  They returned to the dome with MB1 in tow. The messenger bot wouldn't be a useful digger, but it could fetch equipment and push away the dusty soil as they dug it up. The process of clearing that one section of the dome took over an hour. The dust was easy to move, but it tended to fill back in as they worked. Tiago sent MB1 to fetch a small supply of fresh water from SS1's reserves. He used it to clump up some of the dust, forming a retaining wall to keep the rest back. If he didn't have a massive ship above and a fertile planet below, it would have been a dangerously extravagant gesture.

  "I see the lip pretty clearly now. Oh, wait, I'm blind. You tell me about the lip."

  "It worked last time," Audra said. "The seamed area ends at the lip. The lip itself is unbroken. It has a dull brass-like color. I have no idea what material it is made from. The – metal? – isn't just a solid lip. It has studs, like rivets, every tenth of a meter or so. They aren't perfectly even in their distribution. I'm sure they aren't rivets. That wouldn't be a smart design for something air tight."

  "Stop. Why design the outside of the dome? Expecting visitors? Let's assume not. Maybe the studs are the controls," Tiago said.

  "Can I suggest an alternative?" Audra asked with a smirk.

  "Sure."

  "We have hand-held scanning units on SS1. We could look for electrical energy or electric eye sensors or any of the other known ways to identify a control," Audra suggested.

  "The ways known to us on Earth," Tiago clarified. "This is an alien construct."

  "Yes," she said. "We only know what we know."

  MB1 was dispatched to get the scanners. While it was gone, Tiago insisted that Audra continue describing the dome.

  "The seam is a little bit jagged down here in the lower left corner," she said.

  Tiago tapped that spot with his boot. A small dome, barely big enough to enclose them both appeared around them. The seamed area fell away a moment later. They were in some sort of spontaneous airlock. It was more than a little unsettling.

  "Ring the bell with your elbow," Tiago said. "Of course."

  "What?" Audra asked him distractedly.

  She was busy trying to assess the danger present in their new situation.

  "The old joke," Tiago said. "When you get to the house, ring the doorbell with your elbow. Why? Well, you aren't coming empty-handed, are you?"

  "I don't understand," Audra said.

  "The access point is where it can be kicked so that someone carrying supplies can trigger it without putting down their load. There's no security. No trap. This is an entrance designed for convenience."

  Audra didn't respond immediately. She stopped looking around. It took Tiago a moment too long to switch from concerned to suspicious. Audra hit him once, knocking him on his back. He was vaguely aware of MB1 returning, just outside the smaller dome, as she opened his suit. The air in the dome was very much like the air on the planet. He had about an hour before breathing it would cause irreversible damage. He tried to seal it back up, but she sat on his belly and pinned his wrists beneath her knees.

  "Why?"

  "The Masterless do not tolerate intruders," the thing controlling Audra said.

  Chapter Twelve: Spare Parts

  Captain's Log: Ship Day 622

  Computer generated stub: Captain Manuel has assumed command.

  Tiago woke up in a pitch black room. He did his best to betray no sign that he was awake. The silence was oppressive. Other than the coldness of the floor, he was in sensory isolation. Tiago could gather nothing by staying still. He took the risk of moving. Lights, apparently on a motion sensor, winked on. He wasn't restrained, so he stood up.

  It was a large gray room, lined with shelves. He would be hard pressed to look around and find anything which told him he was on a foreign moon, in an alien's building. It looked, more or less, like every supply room he'd ever seen. It was clean, that made it different from some, and well lit – the light softly glowing from the white panels set into the join where the ceiling met the wall -- which was not always the norm, but it was still well within the baseline of his experience. The ceiling was off-white, the walls were a neutral gray, the shelves were black.

  Normal, normal, and normal.

  "This is a rather dull moment," Tiago said to no one.

  A small robot glided silently up to him. It seemed to use some sort of hover tech – mag-lev, perhaps – but other than the lack of wheels, it looked like a close variation on the messenger bots that ran through the corridors of the Interrogative. That made him think about MB1, alone somewhere on the surface, which in turn made him think about Audra. The guilt of not thinking of her first hit him. He wasn't used to caring about her body. It was a thing that could be rebuilt on a whim. Now that she thought of it differently, Tiago felt obligated to do the same.

  The robot issued some sort of sounds. Tiago assumed they were supposed to be language. The words, if they were words, had no meaning for him. He couldn't discern anything from the tone; he knew Earth standards wouldn't apply. Tiago literally didn't know if he was being threatened, offered dinner, or interrogated. Ignoring the robot, he started walking around, looking for a door. It followed him like a puppy, growling out its bizarre litany of sounds as it went.

  The small black door he found was not that far off from Earth normal. Tiago assumed that similarity of requirements created similarity of form. It was about half a foot shorter than his expectations, and a touch wider. Tall enough for him to walk through without stooping. There was no handle, or knob, or palm plate. It did, however, have hinges visible and a little kick plate which was situated where the opener for the dome door was. He suppressed the urge to leave immediately, and took a moment to consider the implications of the door.

  "So, Rover," he said to the robot, "hinges on the inside imply that this wasn't designed as a cell. If I had, say, a screwdriver, I could pop the pins. Prison doors would have the hinges on the outside. This is encouraging. Might actually not be locked. Might not have a lock."

  He looked at the robot as if he expected it to understand. There was no sign it did. The growls continued before -- while -- and after he spoke. Shrugging, Tiago tapped the kick plate with his foot. The door swung slowly open toward him, forcing him to take a few small steps backward. Beyond was a gray corridor. He poked his head out and saw three black doors along the opposite wall.

  "Come along, Rover," he said to amuse himself.

  Stepping into the hallway, with the robot close behind, he noticed another door on the same wall as the one he was using. It was like the others, except that it was white. That was enough to make him decide to try it first. When he got close, he realized that the door had some tone-on-tone markings. It looked sort of like Braille to him. On a hunch, he walked back to 'his' black door. It had a different arrangement of dots. He did his best to memorize it. It might help him determine if he was walking in circles as he tried to find his way out.

  Returning to the white door, he located the kick plate and tapped it with his foot. The robot followed behind, growling constantly.

  "Someone needs a trip to the vet," Tiago said as he walked through the door.

  The new hallway was likewise gray. At the far end, he thought he heard some sort of mechanical sounds, beyond the next white door. He walked up, briefly looked at the not-braille on that door and then walked through. On the other side was a huge room, filled with a single, huge machine, clearly three or four stories tall. A hydraulic arm, or something which operated on similar principles, was moving up and down on the part of the machine nearest him. The whole of it looked worn. Probably pitted by the acidic nature of the dome's atmosphere, he thought.

  "Rover, why aren't I in searing pain? I clearly can't breath this air and yet, here I am. What are your Masterless masters up to, eh boy?"

  Receiving just the continued growling as an answer, Tiago turned away from the robot and focused the moving arm.

  "Form follows function. An arm moving like that is probably a pump of some sort. W
ater pump? Oil pump? This is a moon, so probably neither. What if I have it backwards? Maybe the arm's motion is part of a power generating mechanism. Can't be geothermal, this isn't a planet. Hell, it might be geothermal if the moon has a hot core; can't rule it out. Whatever it is, mucking it up is probably in my best interests. Broken things attract repairmen. I get along better with people than hardware. Come along, Rover. I think I might need your help."

  Tiago walked around the room, looking at everything. It was easily over sixteen hundred square feet in addition to being a few stories tall. He noticed three more doors, all of them closed. On the mechanism itself, there were several more arms, in ones and twos on each side, all moving as the first one was. While everything showed signs of wear, one of the arms had particularly large cracks in its casing.

  He bent down, grabbed the little robot, and wedged him into the largest of the cracks. The growls grew louder, but they were drowned out by the sound of the metal of the robot's body scraping against the metal of the moving arm. By the time the arm jammed, the robot was silent.

  "Diplomacy," Tiago said to the ruined robot, "is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while looking for a big enough rock. No applause Rover, I didn't make that one up."

  The growling had stopped. The robot was still. The arm was completely jammed and immobile. Tiago walked around again. He saw that the other arms continued to move.

  "I'd hoped that Rover would gum up the entirety of the works. One should be enough. Now we wait for the mechanic," Tiago said as he sat on the floor.

  Chapter Thirteen: A Few Small Repairs

  Captain's Log: Ship Day 622

  Computer generated stub: New course laid in…

  Tiago woke up in the dark. He pushed back the feelings of hunger and thirst. There was nothing at hand to satisfy either. As soon as he moved, the lights came back on. The inert robot was still jammed in the works. No repair crew was evident. With a yawn and a stretch, Tiago started walking toward the furthest of the three doors. It opened onto a white corridor. On the floor was a black stripe with a vaguely crown-like image cut out of the stripe every eight inches or so. That lead to another white door, to another hallway. This one had a black stripe on the floor with little circles every eight inches. The door at the end was also white. Tiago opened it.

  Three robots, all about three feet tall charged toward him. He tried to close the door. They got there first and pushed the door, and him, back. He tripped over his own feet and landed hard, in a sitting position, on the floor. Looking up, he saw that he was surrounded. They were floaters, like the first robot. One of them growled at him. He struggled to his feet only to be herded by the three of them. The path went straight back to the room he woke up in originally. At least they weren't growling continuously.

  An idea struck him as the opened the storage room door.

  "Robots. Halt," he commanded.

  The robots stopped. Tiago blinked. He hadn't expected it to work. It was just something he had to try. Still, it had worked. His spoken command – his spoken English language command – had worked on alien robots.

  "Robots. Where am I?"

  They all growled a few – words? – and then went silent.

  "Make a beeping sound," Tiago said.

  They growled, briefly.

  "Call that 'yes.' Now, make a longer beep, which we will call 'no.'"

  They growled a bit longer.

  "Are your speakers working properly?"

  Long growl.

  "Can you take me to your masters?"

  Long growl.

  "No, hmmm… oh, wait. Can you take me to the Masterless… um… leader?"

  Brief growl.

  They surrounded him and herded him back through the machine room. Using another of the white doors, the three robots steered him into a hallway with a solid black stripe. It led to yet another door which was also white, except the the stripe on the floor was continued on the door. Inside was a single – chair? – it had a flat part and a piece coming up which might be a backrest. Instead of legs, the entire bottom was a solid cube. He sat down and, having no better focus in the featureless room, addressed the ceiling.

  "I'm here and I'm not dead, so I'm guessing you still need me for something," Tiago said.

  "Spare parts," came the response.

  He might have been offended, or worried, about what they said, but he was too focused on the way the said it.

  "That's Portuguese," he said. "Beautiful accent, I might add. How?"

  "This is why we took control of the voice subsystem of your ship's computer. We now speak all of the languages it knows," the Masterless voice said.

  "What should I call you?" Tiago asked.

  "I am called the Prime Lesser," the voice replied.

  Tiago smirked at that and immediately regretted it. He didn't know if they knew body language. Now that he finally had an audience, Tiago had to perform flawlessly. They called him 'spare parts' and he didn't like the implication. A con man survives by appearing to be useful. It was time for that skill set to come out of retirement.

  "You are in need of a repairman, yes?"

  "There was new damage to our generator, just today," the Prime said. "And no, we don't need your help. Systems are at nearly half efficiency and we only need a trifling fraction of that to support what we have left here. You are not the first to offer."

  Nuance. The voice had attitude in its tone. That, along with the accent, told Tiago that the Masterless had done more than simply learn from the ship's main computer. It had accessed the sims programming. He wondered what it thought about the propaganda running through those routines.

  But, they couldn't access the government sims, the unmodded ones, he remembered. Whatever they learned came from Nellie, Neville… and Audra. That might give him a way to survive this.

  "Where is Audra?"

  "Her body is on the bridge of the ship. Thank you for granting her crew status. We couldn't have unlocked the rest of the computer so easily otherwise. He mind-construct is still in the ship's computer. We won't shut her down until she's done," the Prime said.

  Damn, thought Tiago. Damn me.

  "What is she doing?"

  "Piloting the ship home. We have plans for the Interrogative," the Prime said.

  Tiago stopped talking. If they knew the route to take the Interrogative home, then they knew where Earth was, he realized. Too many things warred in his head for his attention. He needed to save Audra. He needed to save himself. He might actually need to save the entire Earth from the Masterless. If he could do all of that; would he go home? Would their maps make that an option? Hadn't he just spent all this time fleeing Earth?

  The Prime Lesser did not press him for conversation. It didn't ask if he were alright. The room remained silent, except for the barely perceptible whirring sound coming from the three robots. Finally, Tiago resumed speaking.

  "Where are you, Prime Lesser? I'd like to see you," Tiago said.

  A holo projected into the room. The creature was perhaps half Tiago's height. It had three legs, presently it had two forward for stability, and one back to bear its weight. The net effect was that it looked like it was a legless creature leaning back on a three legged stool. The head – Tiago guessed it was the head – was vaguely conical, coming to a point like a dunce cap. He could not discern any features on it. To make up for the three legs, it only had one arm, hanging asymmetrically from the right side of its body, roughly where the shoulder would go on a human of that same height. The skin was a mottled gray, a color which reminded Tiago of rot and decay. Despite it being a holo, and therefore having no smell, Tiago wrinkled his nose.

  "Among my kind, I'm thought to be pretty," the holo of the Prime Lesser said.

  "No offense intended. While I am happy to look on you this way, I was hoping to actually look at you in person. Can we meet?"

  "You are more than a century too late. The last time I looked like this, we'd only been the Masterless for a few centuries," the holo said.


  Tiago felt like he was getting nowhere. If he wasted too much more time, the Interrogative would begin jumping toward Earth. He needed the ship here. He needed a way to get back on board and in his control. There had to be a way to trick the Prime Lesser. At the core of every good con was one idea: Find out what they want and make them think you are critical to their success.

  "Why talk to me? Are you lonely?"

  "I like speaking to insects. We have captured many of them in our time," the holo said.

  "Insects. The other ships on the planet…"

  Tiago's mother, Telma, used to say 'tilt your head until you see from their perspective.' Tiago had his head-tilt moment. He knew why they were Masterless. He knew why he was a prisoner. He knew that Earth was safe. He knew why they didn't live on the planet. It all clicked together now.

  "Prime Lesser, would you humor me with an odd request? Can you define an insect?"

  "Wind, rain, many things can potentially harm the crops. The insect is different than all other threats. The insect has intent," the holo said. "You are a smart insect. You figured out the maintenance language and told us you meant the crops no harm. We were not fooled. You are not the first insect we have caught. Some of them were smart, too. You are not the smartest."

  "Others have tried to made you think that they were no threat."

  "Yes," the holo agreed.

  "Only one type of insect ever succeeded, right?"

  "We don't talk about that," the holo said.

  "When you said that the Interrogative was going home, you meant the planet below, didn't you?" Tiago asked, pulling back from the other line of questioning, for now.

  "Yes," the holo agreed. "Where else would we call home?"

  "When you called me 'spare parts' you meant that I could be forced to land the ship and disable it if you lost control of Audra."

  "No reason to kill you until we are sure she'd done her job," the holo agreed. "Then you are both expendable."