“The possibility appears to exist,” Bast said.
Gloria bent her head in thought as she ran through mentalist computations. Finally, she opened channels with Jon.
“Wait until you hear this,” she told the captain.
***
Once more, the destroyer drifted through space. It left behind the monstrous cybership and headed toward the nearby MK2.
Jon radioed the Centurion, who was with the marines in the cargo hold. The men were holding up, receiving instructions for low G maneuvering.
“Anything hostile down there?” Jon asked Uther Kling.
The Neptunian slowly shook his head.
Jon rechecked the sensor board. The Nathan Graham had far more powerful sensors, and this time the giant cybership was almost as close to the target as the destroyer was. Still, two sets of eyes were usually better than one.
“Can’t spy any energy readings,” Jon muttered.
“You don’t need me for this one,” Walleye said.
“You don’t want to suit up?” Jon asked.
“No. I’m allergic to spacewalks and—”
Jon chuckled. “No, problem. You can stay aboard the destroyer. I’ll leave a few marines with you. So you’ll have company.”
“You still don’t trust me, Captain?” Walleye asked.
“I trust you, but a little caution concerning my ride off the moon seems prudent.”
“I agree,” Walleye said. “Why take needless risks?”
Jon stopped listening to the mutant as he saw something on the sensor board. It could be—no, it wasn’t a launch pit.
“Gun tube,” Jon said a second latter. “I’m putting it on your screen,” Jon told Kling.
Several seconds later, the destroyer launched two small missiles. They sped for the tracking gun. The Nathan Graham’s laser hit the weapon system. As it did, the gun tube exploded, creating a pinprick of light down on the charcoal-colored surface.
The comm light blinked on Jon’s board. Gloria explained, “The robots must have been trying to launch something just as the laser struck. The gun’s munition is what caused the explosion, destroying everything.”
“Do you think that was an automated response?” Jon asked.
“No. I think it indicates robots. I don’t think that’s an empty moon.”
Jon slid forward on his seat, using the destroyer’s scanners in earnest. He spotted two more gun tubes. Each time, the Nathan Graham destroyed the enemy weapon system before it could fire.
“The AIs don’t want us landing here, either,” Jon said.
“You know,” Walleye told him. “It just occurred to me. The robots aren’t stupid. They can calculate odds. Maybe they’re only half-heartedly firing at us.”
“Why?”
“To lure us closer,” Walleye said. “Once you land, and once the Nathan Graham orbits closely, then the robots will self-destruct the moon. They’ll take us out at a blow.”
“Grim,” Jon said, “but all too plausible.” He opened channels with Gloria. “I want the Nathan Graham to pull back.” Before the mentalist could ask why, Jon explained Walleye’s reasoning.
“Roger,” Gloria said. “We’ll start to back up. Do you think you should take so many marines down with you?”
“I do,” Jon said.
“But if the robots—”
“It’s just a theory,” Jon said. “We can’t eliminate all risks. We have to take a chance now and again if we’re going to grab the prize. We absolutely must grab the construction tech. Without it…”
“You’re right,” Gloria said. “I just hate to see you risking so much after you’ve done so much to get us this far.”
“I’m the captain,” Jon said.
“Which makes my point for me,” Gloria said. “The captain should be at his post on the Nathan Graham, not leading a commando strike.”
“I’m exactly where I need to be,” Jon said. “Take care of my cybership, Mentalist. We’re heading down.”
“Take care, Jon.”
“Roger that,” he said. “Out.”
Jon glanced at Kling. The Neptunian brought the destroyer closer to the dark surface.
“I think you failed to understand my meaning,” Walleye said.
“I understood you perfectly,” Jon replied. “Now it’s time that you understand me.”
-12-
Jon led one of the columns of battlesuited marines. He didn’t actually lead from the front. He had scout marines do that.
The battlesuited marines used a special long-striding technique to cross the barren moonscape. The surface gravity was negligible, and there was no metallic surface to magnetize boots onto. A few times, a marine strode too hard, and he floated off the dark surface. A different marine radioed his floating partner, aimed a stubby weapon and fired a grappler. He towed his partner back onto the surface, and the pair long-strode to catch up with the column afterward.
“I see an opening,” the Centurion radioed.
“I see your coordinates,” Jon said, as he saw the Centurion’s correlative blinking green light on his HUD grid. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”
“I’m setting up kill zones,” the Centurion informed Jon.
Jon hadn’t expected anything less from the man.
Soon, he arrived and so did the other columns. Jon inspected the opening. It was a large pit with blasted-away doors. Big moon-rock stairs led down.
“See anything on your sensors?” Jon asked the Centurion.
“No,” the man said.
“Send down scouts,” Jon said, hoping he wasn’t sending marines to their deaths.
The scouts went down the stairs, soon finding a maze of corridors below.
“Looks like a vast ant heap,” the Centurion radioed.
Jon sighed. He knew the drill. He also knew it was going to cost him men. But they had to grab the alien construction tech.
“Here’s how we’re going to do this,” Jon said over the command channel.
***
The next twenty-one hours proved brutal. The small opening absorbed the Centurion’s entire company.
Octopoid robots showed up, plenty of them. They laid ambushes, fired rockets, used powerful explosives and twice tried suicidal octopoid rushes. The Centurion lost thirty-two good marines while cleaning out the octopoids. The enemy lost over a thousand robots.
Jon had Walleye and his guardian marines take the destroyer off-moon. They fired missiles from there, breaking up octopoid reinforcements trying to slip more robots across the surface.
The Nathan Graham eliminated twenty-two enemy missiles with the laser. Each missile assault attempted to take out the deadly destroyer.
At the end of the twenty-one hours, Jon’s group broke through to the inner surface of the hollow moon. He saw the amazing sight first, and it gave him hope that maybe he could still pull this off strategically.
***
Jon stood inside a large hangar bay. One of the marines had found the controls that opened the doors.
In his battlesuit, Jon clanked to the edge of the inner surface. Twenty or so kilometers away, giant lamps illuminated much of the moon’s hollowness.
Jon marveled at what he saw. There were hundreds, possibly thousands, of small tugs floating in the hollow moon. There was no doubt the alien robots had built the new cybership inside MK2. This was the missing space dock.
The last twenty-one hours had also shown Jon that the robots had stockpiled an immense amount of supplies to finish the new—now destroyed—enemy cybership.
His helmet headphones crackled.
“Captain,” the Centurion said. “You have to come and see this.”
Jon thought he should be telling that to the Centurion. Instead, he asked, “What did you find?”
“I think it’s MK2’s control area.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I found an alien AI. It must have controlled MK2.”
“How many men did you lose breaking into the
chamber?”
“Three more,” the Centurion said. “The last octopoid must have set off explosions. It destroyed the AI cube and most of the computers around the smoldering wreck.”
Jon considered that. “We’re still here.”
“Maybe the AI failed to detonate the moon,” the Centurion said. “Or maybe they never rigged the moon, the space dock, to self-destruct.”
“That would be AI arrogance,” Jon said.
“Maybe,” the Centurion said.
“I’m on my way.”
***
The days passed as the Black Anvil Regiment went octopoid hunting in and on the moon. Hunting in deadly earnest, the space marines developed new tactics to deal with the alien robots. The regiment used massed firepower and maneuver to trick the enemy. The robots fought poorly after the MK2 AI’s destruction. It must have been their coordinating unit.
Despite the bulk and volume of MK2, by the end of the second week, the Centurion could declare victory. They found strange consoles that tracked the positions of the remaining octopoids. With those consoles, the fight finally cycled down and then ended altogether.
Jon had won the alien space dock. Figuring out how to use it might take longer.
He spoke with Gloria in the inner hangar bay. It had been three weeks since they destroyed the enemy cybership. Now, all the lights shone brightly, illuminating the giant inner space dock.
“We have the alien construction tech,” Jon said. “Now we have to figure out how to run it without activating something terrible. Then, we have to decide if we can trust the Nathan Graham inside the moon.”
“It will be a risk,” Gloria admitted. “I’ve done some computations. You have plenty of stock laid up in MK2. It should allow us to make major repairs to the Nathan Graham. We won’t finish all the needed repairs, though. To do that, we’d have to start bringing Makemake ores here like the robots must have done.”
“You mean clean out the robots still down on the dwarf planet.”
Gloria nodded her bubble helmet.
“I’m not sure I want to risk losing more marines,” Jon said.
“You might not have a choice if you want to fully repair the cybership.”
Jon knew what she meant. They were so far away from Earth, out here in the Kuiper Belt. Unless they could thoroughly fix the Nathan Graham’s matter/antimatter engine, it would take them a long time to get back to the Saturn System. The cybership had already picked up the exhaust signatures of the SLN fleet heading for the Jupiter System. If the SLN invaded the Saturn System…
“Well,” Jon said. “At least we stopped the AIs’ master plan.”
“You don’t know that,” Gloria said. “There could be more bases like this in the Kuiper Belt or maybe even in the Oort cloud.”
Jon didn’t want to hear that.
“It’s true that we’ve won another round in the great battle,” Gloria said. “We’ve gained two bases in the process. One is in the Saturn System, and maybe we can exploit this one here. We have the greatest ship in the Solar System. But that just makes us king of a very small pond.”
“You think more cyberships might show up from out there?” Jon said.
“I give that an extremely high probability.”
“We have to get ready for them then.”
“We need to do more than that,” Gloria said. “I suspect there are no more AI bases of great size in the Belt. That means we’ve likely eliminated that terrible threat for the next few years.”
“Unless more of them drop out of hyperspace,” Jon said.
“True,” Gloria said. “But that’s missing my point. We’ve stopped the AIs for the moment. Now, we have to use the pause and unify our Solar System.”
“Conquer the Solar League?” asked Jon.
“That seems like the next logical step.”
“How do we conquer them?” Jon asked. “I can beat any one fleet in any one place, but I hardly have the space marines to go down and hold a planet or even a moon.”
“That will be a problem,” Gloria admitted.
Jon laughed sourly. “It’s more than a problem.”
“For an ordinary person, yes,” Gloria said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t you consider yourself a Great Captain?”
Jon felt his face heat up as he blushed.
“A Great Captain, given your tools, would surely figure out a way to unite humanity,” Gloria said. “We need a powerful base of operations if we hope to defeat a cybership fleet.”
Jon didn’t even want to think about that just yet.
“We’ve won this round,” Gloria said. “But we still have a gigantic task ahead of us.”
“Yeah,” Jon said.
The mentalist slapped his battlesuit shoulder. “Don’t be down, Captain. You’ve done the impossible. Rejoice. We’re partway to truly giving the AIs something to think about.”
Jon smiled. The other cyberships didn’t know it yet, but there was a race in the galaxy that had defeated them twice now. The humans had so far proven too big a pill to swallow. Could they unite the Solar System, and could they grow powerful enough to free other species from the death machines?
Those were big questions. Maybe it would be best to take things one step at a time. They had beaten the second cybership and stolen the AI construction tech. Now, it was time to exploit those victories to the max.
THE END
To the Reader: Thanks! I hope you’ve enjoyed The A.I. Gene. If you liked the book and would like to see the series continue, please put up some stars and a review. Let new readers know what’s in store for them.
—Vaughn Heppner
The A.I. Gene (The A.I. Series Book 2) Page 30
