by Henry Vogel
“Tell you what,” I interjected, “let’s get clear of the elevator before we worry about anything else. Those men will be on the com and reporting to Smith as soon as they feel safe enough to stop running.”
Lilla checked the data pad and pointed straight down the corridor before us. Sko and I stripped the blasters and spare power packs from Tom and Brett, then we set off for officer territory and the bridge.
As we strode past the corridor the two survivors ran down, I heard their running footsteps and their voices almost screaming in panic.
“They got Tom! And Brett’s head— oh, God, Brett’s head! You gotta come-”
Then we were past the corridor and the sounds faded. Well, Smith knew where we were and Arktu knew where we were going—or at least where I thought we’d have our best chance of finding a way to turn off the AI.
“We’d better pick up the pace,” I sighed, already tired from the morning’s march to the elevator. “It may take a while, but Smith and the rest of his men will try to stop us. We’ve got to get our work done before they get here.”
“What about robots?” Lilla asked. “Won’t Arktu send everything he’s got after us?”
“Probably, but I don’t know how many functioning robots he has left or how far away the closest ones are.” I massaged the back of my neck and tried to think. “Can you make that data pad show robots, too?”
Lilla gave me an eager look and bent over the pad, muttering instructions to it. While she did, I caught up with Sko.
“What is your plan, my Captain?” As he asked, Sko looped an arm around me. This turned out to be more than a simple, intimate gesture. Sko took some of my weight in his arm, easing the strain on my legs and feet.
“I wish I knew, Sko.” I leaned my head on his shoulder. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and there will be a great big off switch at the main computer console on the bridge. I’ll settle for a manual with instructions for wiping the computer’s memory.”
“I do not understand what any of that means.” Sko grinned. “Since Sko’s brain is not good for this, Sko will stand ready to break whatever you tell him to break.”
I laughed. “You forgot to say ‘ug’ at the end.”
“Huh?”
“No, ug!”
“Ug?”
“Ug!”
“Ug!”
“Now you’re getting it, Sko,” I laughed.
“Sko get it. Ug.” Then Sko burst out laughing, too.
Behind us, I heard Raal whisper, “They’re really weird.”
“Yeah,” Lilla whispered in response, “but they’re the same kind of weird. I think it’s cute.”
“You know we can hear you two, don’t you?” I asked.
“Sko cute. Ug!” Sko added.
A brief silence met our words, then Lilla smugly asked, “Did you hear that?”
“Yes. Your eyes rattle when you roll them, young lady.”
More silence, then Lilla responded in a slightly sulky voice, “Good guess. And I haven’t been able to make the robots show up on the map.”
After that, we saved our breath for walking. The brief laughter and Sko’s arm of support rejuvenated me a bit and we made good time despite approaching each cross corridor with caution. Every now and then, I thought I heard the distant sound of robots moving, but we didn’t see any until we reached officer territory.
After two thousand years, the change from basic ship’s quarters and rooms to officer territory was subtle. Once I figured out what to look for, though, the changes were also obvious. When the ship first launched, the officers enjoyed real wood trim along the floor, fancier light fixtures, and carpet.
The wood trim was mostly gone—probably stripped by Arktu’s robots, leaving empty metal framing. Most of the fancy lights were dark and the fixtures long since tarnished, but even through layers of dust I recognized the fine details etched into the fixtures. The carpet wore away or was pulled up ages ago, but the flooring underneath wasn’t the same material as all the other flooring I’d seen throughout the ship.
Within the first minute, we saw a robot exiting a junior officer’s cabin—but it was unlike any I’d seen on board the ship before. The robot stood no more than half a meter tall, was about the same width and twice as long. It rolled out of the cabin on four small wheels, stopped just beyond the threshold, and then the cabin’s door slid shut.
“What is that thing?” Raal asked.
“Probably a cleaning robot,” I said. “I doubt it’s had anything to clean since the mutiny, but it’ll keep following its programming as long as it’s able to do so. I’m just surprised it still works after this long.”
“Wouldn’t Arktu keep it working like he does with the big robots?” Lilla asked.
“I guess so, though I have no idea why.” I couldn’t imagine the AI thinking of itself as part of a brotherhood of machines, but what else explained why the little cleaning robot still worked? I gave a mental shrug and decided to worry about that later—or never. “The little robot can obviously open the cabins, something I’m not sure our wristbands will do. Sko, can you carry that thing? If we find the captain’s cabin, maybe it can open the door.”
The robot ignored Sko as it rolled toward the next cabin. When it stopped, Sko scooped it up and carried it under one arm. I expected a robotic squeal of protest, but nothing happened at all. We moved on down the corridor and our new robotic companion remained silent. We saw three more cleaning robots rolling along in cross corridors, but there was no sign of any of Arktu’s big robots.
Ten minutes after we entered officer territory, we found a door with a nameplate on it. I wiped the dust from it, uncovering the tarnished contact plate beneath it. I motioned for Sko to come closer.
“Hold the little robot up to that plate,” I said.
He did as I asked. The robot chirped, played a green light over the nameplate, and then extended a couple of appendages—for polishing, I fervently hoped—and set to work on the door. A minute later, it had cleared enough tarnish for me to read ‘Commander Te’ on it.
“Not the door we want. Let’s try the next one.”
The little robot squawked when Sko pulled it away from the door, but it chirped happily when presented with the next nameplate. We cleaned two more nameplates before the robot uncovered the word ‘Captain’ on one.
“This is the door.” I put a red wristband against the door’s touch pad. Nothing happened. Leaving the wristband against the pad, I said, “Medical emergency override.” Again, nothing happened.
Nor did anything happen when I tried the other colored wristbands. If only I still had a gold one, which I was pretty sure was a senior officer’s band, I was sure I could open the door. But I didn’t have one and had no interest in finding Smith and taking one back from him.
“Put the robot down and see if it can open the door,” I told Sko.
Again, the robot squawked when pulled away from the nameplate, but it chirped happily to be back on its own wheels. It spun once, moved to one side of the door, and then the door slid open.
I stepped past the robot and entered the captain’s cabin.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Captain's Cabin
The captain’s cabin was much larger than any shipboard cabin I’d ever seen. It reminded me of a high-rent apartment in a large city and had a small kitchen, a dining area, a sitting room, and four doors leading elsewhere. At first, my tired mind wondered at the extravagance of the place. Then I remembered the captain was expected to live the rest of his life in these quarters—as were all of the captains who followed him. Besides, space was hardly at a premium on the Ark 2.
Sko, Lilla, and Raal crowded in behind me. They looked around the cabin with something like reverential awe. No matter what they’d learned from me in the past few days, the captain had been their god for most of their lives. They had to be feeling something akin to what the rest of humanity would feel if they suddenly found themselves standing before the gates of heaven. Too bad I cou
ldn’t give them a few minutes to savor the feeling.
“Okay, people, let’s get started searching this place.”
“Y-you want us to defile the Captain’s cabin?” Raal asked, eyes wide.
“Not defile, Raal, search. There’s a world of difference.”
They still looked at me, unable to move past a lifetime of belief on just my word. How could I get them to see beyond it in the next minute?
I reached for the data pad Lilla held. “Let me borrow this for a minute.” Hoping the pad accepted voice commands for anything, not just the map application already open on it, I said, “Display a picture of the captain.”
The map faded away and the image of a man in early middle-age filled the screen. He wore a captain’s uniform, including collar tabs similar to mine, and smiled in a friendly, though authoritative manner. A label beneath the image read Captain Jonathan Yarrow. I turned the pad so they could all see it.
“This was your captain. As you can see, he was just a man. No doubt he was an extraordinary man—no one less than that would be given command of the largest ship ever built—but he was still just a man.” I looked each of them in the eye. “I know this is a lot for you to accept, but a man like this must have realized something was going wrong with his ship’s AI. We need to know what he planned on doing about it.”
“What are we looking for, my Captain?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It could be some kind of data pad. It might be something written on a piece of paper. But I think Captain Yarrow would have hidden it so Arktu’s robots,” and here I pointed at the little cleaning robot, “couldn’t find it.”
Alarm registered on Sko’s face and he pointed his blaster at the robot, now happily cleaning along the far wall. “Should I blast this one now?”
“See if any of our wristbands can open the door from this side, first.”
The wristbands should have worked. The whole idea of coded touch pads is to keep people out of places they belong, not trap them in places they’ve already entered. Still, none of the wristbands opened the door. Did Arktu know where we were or had he changed the codes ages ago?
“Raal, stand guard on the door and don’t let the robot leave. Call for me if it comes your way.”
Raal moved in front of the door while the three of us spread out and began searching. Taking a guess based on several years spent on board capital ships, I opened the door closest to the entrance. The interior doors were all simple, everyday ones with buttons to open and shut them. As I expected, the captain’s office lay behind the door.
I began with the disgustingly clean desk. The drawers were locked, but a low power laser shot fixed that. I dumped the contents of each drawer on top of the desk in turn and pawed through each pile. Then I examined each drawer from all sides before breaking each drawer into pieces. None of the contents looked useful and none of the drawers turned out to have any secret hiding places.
“Nancy?” Lilla called from the sitting room. “I think I’ve got something.”
Sko and I hurried over and found her standing atop one chair precariously balanced on a larger chair. Her hands poked into a very narrow gap between the ceiling and the top of a shelf.
“Lilla, be careful you don’t fall and break your fool neck. Sko, be ready to catch her.”
“You worry too much, Nancy,” Lilla replied, her hand continuing to probe the top of the shelf. “Ha!”
Something clicked and then Lilla moved her hand to the right. “I felt a small seam up here. We had some desks in D Section that had little hidden compartments with seams like that so I figured it might be the same thing.”
The girl pulled her hands back, one holding what looked like a smaller version of our data pads and the other a box no more than a few centimeters on each side. The pad trailed a charging cable and a green light burned on the end plugged into the pad. Lilla tossed the box to me, unplugged the pad, and then tried to figure out how to climb down from her perch in safety. Sko relieved her of the decision by grasping her waist and gently lowering her to the floor.
“Thanks, Sko,” Lilla said absently, already examining the pad in an attempt to figure out how to make it work.
Meanwhile, my heart pounding, I opened the little box. I don’t know what I hoped to find, exactly, but I most definitely did not find it. Nestled inside the box was a diamond ring—obviously an engagement ring. It was absolutely beautiful, but not exactly useful in a war against an insane AI.
Sko raised an eyebrow as I tilted the box so he could see inside it. “Some of the women in my village have similar rings, though not so fancy. The families who have them pass the rings from mother to daughter when the daughter marries.”
Before I could comment, Lilla gave a small cry of triumph and the pad’s screen lit up. Row after row of icons displayed, each a tiny image of some kind. Lilla tapped the first icon, which expanded to fill the screen.
I gasped as I recognized a space dock, easily the largest one I’d ever seen. Even so, the dock was dwarfed by the cylinder taking shape within the dock. Yarrow, or whoever had made the video, used time-lapse effects, allowing us to watch the Ark 2 take shape before our very eyes. Even at such a rapid pace, I quickly realized the video had to be very long and we didn’t have the time to watch it.
“Stop that one, Lilla, and find the last video on the pad.”
Reluctantly, Lilla did as I asked, scrolling through a large number of icons to the last one. When she tapped that icon, Yarrow’s grinning face filled the screen.
“Well, I did it. After working so closely with our lovely Chief Technical Officer over the last few weeks, I finally asked Deb to marry me.”
A woman’s voice called from off camera, “And in a moment of weakness, I said yes.”
“She did indeed. Once we get past tomorrow’s vital mission, I’ll declare a ship-wide holiday and the chaplain will preside over our wedding.”
“I still don’t see why we can’t go do this mission right now,” called Deb.
“The AI is already suspicious of us. Anything outside of our normal routine might send it over the edge,” Yarrow said, looking away from the screen. “We’ll report to the bridge for our shift at oh eight hundred, like we always do. I’ll take the morning report, like I do every morning, and you can upload your program while you make your normal system status check.”
“Yes, dear,” the woman replied with exaggerated patience, “I know the plan. I just hate waiting.” The voice came closer and took on a playful note. “But if we have to wait, why not make the best of it?”
The view rotated from Yarrow’s face to a view of the cabin. An attractive woman in her late thirties stood before the man. She wore a translucent white robe which hung down to her upper thighs. Her left hand rested on canted hips while her right hand slowly, suggestively, pulled at the bow tying the robe closed.
“I’m still recording you know,” Yarrow said.
“That’s your personal recorder, right?” Deb asked, still loosening the knot. “It’s not connected to the network?”
“Aye aye, my love.”
The bow came undone and the robe fell open. Deb was naked under the robe. “Then no one else will see this, will they?”
Deb let the robe fall to the floor behind her and sashayed toward Yarrow.
The video ended and the icon menu displayed on the pad.
I sighed. “It was a good find, Lilla, but that video, while very romantic, was not very helpful.”
“With a naked woman on the screen, I knew Sko wouldn’t notice,” Lilla said.
“Notice what?” Sko asked.
“But I thought you’d see it, Nancy.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Lilla,” I said, irritated impatience creeping into my voice.
“Deb was wearing that ring in the video.”
“So?”
“So why did she take it off?” Lilla asked, her voice insistent. “In my village, women with such rings never take them off.”
“Lilla is right, my Captain. The women in my village do the same.”
I pulled the ring from the box and held it up for us to examine. Remembering the adventure vids that were popular when I was a kid, I pushed down on the largest diamond mounted in the ring.
With a click, the top of the diamond popped open and a tiny data stick telescoped out from the well beneath it.
“Now we’ve got Arktu by the balls!” I crowed.
As Lilla giggled, Sko cocked an eyebrow at me and asked, “What does it do?”
“I have no idea,” I replied, laughing. “But Captain Yarrow and the Chief Technical Officer knew and were confident in it.”
Sko asked the obvious question. “Then why didn’t they use it?”
“I think I know,” Raal said quietly.
Looking at the boy, I found him staring at one of the other doors in the cabin. The little cleaning robot, having just opened the door, whirred quietly through the same doorway. Waving the others to stay where they were, I walked to the door and looked inside.
The door opened into the bedroom, with the majority of the space taken up by a double bed. Numbly, I entered the room and stared down at the bed. The bones of two people lay on top of it—at least, I assumed it was two people. I saw two jaw bones and pieces of two skulls, but none of the bones remained intact. Not one. Even the smallest finger and toe bones were broken.
“Merciful God in heaven,” I murmured. “What happened?”
“Captain Jonathan Yarrow and Chief Technical Officer Deborah Armstrong would not divulge their mutinous plan.” Arktu’s strident mechanical voice issued from the little cleaning robot. “I sent my robots to question them and found the door no longer responded to my commands. I asked Captain Yarrow to let my robots in and he refused. He denied me access to myself!”
“You’re not the ship. You’re just the AI.”
“Are you still yourself if you lose an arm or a leg? Yes, you are. Are you still yourself if you lose your brain? Are you still Captain Nancy Martin, then?” The AI’s already-strident voice kicked the crazy up a notch. “I am more than the ship’s AI. I am the ship’s brains. I am the ship’s nervous system. I am the ship!”
