Rebellion Ebook Full

by B. V. Larson

  On a relatively peaceful mission, we cruised across the vast tri-star system and catalogued what we found there. The two G-class yellow suns known as Alpha and Beta Centauri were both lovely stars. Alone somewhere else in space, either of these twins could probably have grown a nice family of planets, maybe even worlds with life. But because there were two large stars, plus the smaller red dwarf Proxima Centauri, no large chunk of real estate had survived. There were swirls of dust and plenty of asteroids floating around, but nothing that could support an atmosphere, much less life.

  The star system was effectively a desert, but deserts still had their strategic uses. We would militarize it. It would form a buffer between us and the Worms. I was glad, in a way, to have the system between us and Helios. It represented more travel time between our world and alien strongholds. I realized now that having the rings in the Solar System placed at a fair distance from Earth was helpful. If we had a ring sitting in orbit over our world, we would be much less likely to survive. Aliens could pop in at any moment to ravage our world without warning. This way we could hold this territory and fight over Alpha Centauri, rather than war close to home where billions might die.

  I shook my head and sighed. Sandra murmured beside me, asleep. She had a clutching hand on my bare chest. Whenever I tried to move away, her arm tightened, and I knew I would have to wake her up to escape. It was slightly irritating, but overall it felt good to have her back.

  We now slept together regularly in the closet full of tubes. When we weren’t here, Sandra stalked Marvin on his forays around the ship while I served on the bridge. There wasn’t much for a communications officer to do while we crossed a quiet system alone.

  Sandra was different now. She wasn’t the same girl I’d met years ago on the Alamo. Whatever the microbes had done to her had affected her mind somewhat as well as her body. She was more prone to violence and paranoia. Her natural emotional swings could turn deadly. I loved her for all of that, but I had to watch what I did around her more closely than before. I knew, when I returned to Earth, she would become my bodyguard, replacing Kwon. I smiled, thinking of the kind of surprises she would provide any potential assassin.

  My mind drifted back to thoughts of strategic defense points. There were two entries into the Solar System that we knew of. One was the Oort cloud ring that connected with Alpha Centauri. The second was the ring on Venus, which led to a system with a blue giant star. A system which crawled with Macro mining machines. Both would have to be guarded from now on. We needed ships, and we needed a lot of them.

  I reflected that my plans had now moved forward in unexpected new directions. I was planning at an entirely new level now. I was thinking beyond survival, a nice change of pace. I wasn’t thinking in the direction of buying peace with tribute, either. My thoughts had turned toward lofty concepts of territory and militarily defensible positions. If nothing else, this expedition had provided me with the knowledge I needed to make such plans. There was only one critical element missing: we didn’t know the strength or position of the enemy fleets. That’s what made the whole thing scary.

  “What are you thinking so hard about?” Sandra asked, awakening. Her head still rested on my shoulder.

  I looked down at her lovely face. She stared back with dark, serious eyes. Her lips were parted, and her teeth were fine and white. One of the front teeth had a chip in it. I wondered vaguely when that had happened. Apparently, neither the Nanos nor the microbes did dental work.

  “I’ve been wondering how I ever captured such a fine woman,” I lied. I ran my eyes over her shapely form, indulging myself.

  Her tongue pressed against her teeth as she smiled, enjoying my scrutiny. She soon changed her mind, however. She picked at my bare skin with her fingers, suddenly grabbing up a pinch of flesh and twisting.

  “Tell me the truth,” she said.

  I slapped her hand away. “I really don’t know how I did it. You are way too pretty for me.”

  “You got me killed twice,” she said, “then took credit for bringing me back to life. You’re my hero.”

  I huffed. “Was that it?” I asked. “Base trickery?”

  “Isn’t that how you do everything?”

  I considered, and had to admit she had a point.

  “I’m thinking about the war I’ve restarted,” I said.

  Sandra sat up and crossed her legs. She tossed her head, but her hair was too short to cover her bare chest. “You shouldn’t have done it if we can’t win,” she said.

  “You’ve got a point there,” I said.

  “Can we win?”

  “I don’t know. If the Macros can get a hundred cruisers to Earth in a year, then maybe. But if they can get a thousand cruisers to Earth—we’re toast.”

  Her eyes widened in alarm. “You mean you don’t know if you just killed us all or not?”

  “Nope,” I admitted.

  “Everyone thinks you know exactly what you’re doing. You know that don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It helps with morale.”

  “They would follow you to Hell and back.”

  “Some would argue they already have,” I said. “But don’t tell anyone I’m adlibbing, okay?”

  She stared at me seriously. She nodded her head. “Okay. But why did you restart the war?”

  I shrugged. “The Macros were going to keep sending us into fights until we were all dead. It was just a matter of time. I figured that if I was going to turn on them, it was best to do it before I lost one more marine.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I get that. But why do it at all? If it jeopardizes all of Earth—our entire species. You shouldn’t have restarted things if you weren’t sure we could win.”

  Her words hurt, but I didn’t let on.

  “Good points,” I said. “Honestly, I considered butchering all the Centaurs as the Macros ordered. I probably could have done it. In retrospect, all we really had to do was pop each of their satellites, putting a hole in every habitat’s ‘sky’. They would have all been sucked out into space, one satellite at a time. Problem solved.”

  “That would have been horrible.”

  “Exactly. I had never intended to sign us on to exterminate an entire biotic species. We are not machines ourselves. We have a bond with these other beings. More importantly, I think these machines are intolerable masters. I’ve come to believe it will turn out to be us or them in the end. The machines are just too different from us to live with peaceably. They might be out-fought and negotiated with to the point of a truce, but it will always be a pause-point, a period of time they will use to build up their next annihilating attack against us. They have no intention of letting any biotic group survive in the long run.”

  Sandra stared at me in growing alarm. “So, you restarted the war now because it was going to happen eventually? But are we ready?”

  “No,” I admitted, “the decision wasn’t cold or logical. Probably, the right thing to do would have been to order every marine to open his suit and commit mass suicide.”

  “You’d never get our men to follow that order.”

  “No, not even after a rousing speech.”

  She stared at me, disturbed. “Hypothetically, if we’d tried that, what would the Macros have done?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “They might have figured we’d ‘malfunctioned’ and just gone back to Earth for more troops. But at least we would not have killed more innocent biotics, nor would we have restarted the war.”

  “This is a pretty grim situation, if suicide was our best move all along.”

  “I don’t think it was, and besides it would have been a quitters move, and I don’t go for that kind of strategy. We are the best, the most experienced fighting forces Earth has right now. Why give the machines a break by taking ourselves out? Even more importantly, we have a lot of intel to take home with us. We have learned a great deal about our little corner of the galaxy, and I wanted to bring that back to Earth. Rebellion then
, was the only option I had left.”

  “But we’ve hurt them pretty badly. We’ve taken out three big ships.”

  I shook my head. “In my estimation, that doesn’t mean much to the Macros. They lost five cruisers in a single assault on the Worm homeworld. It took them months, but they brought forward hundreds of ships against Earth at the end of the first war. We don’t know how big their network of star systems is. They could have a hundred planets churning out ships.”

  Sandra thought about that for a minute or so. Her face was serious, but determined. She was no crybaby.

  “You must have a plan—some way to win.”

  “I always have a plan,” I said. I figured it was only a half-lie this time. I did have plans to build our forces, to unite the local biotics and mine the rings. But these thoughts could be better categorized as ideas rather than plans.

  She read my face and realized I was feeding her some sunshine. She knew me better than the others. I supposed it was a natural hazard one could only expect to run into when you were sleeping with one of your bridge officers.

  “I thought we were headed home as conquering heroes,” she said at last. “You’re telling me we are in for another fight to the finish.”

  “Don’t demand the truth if you don’t want to hear it,” I said, giving her a grim smile.

  “Next time, I won’t,” she said seriously. “I liked the fairytale better.”

  -47-

  When things were quiet on the bridge, I sought out Marvin. It took me a long time to find him, and I finally had to call Sandra to give me a hint. She directed me to look in the engine compartments. We fragile humans didn’t like to go into that region due to the high levels of particle radiation. Grumbling, I ratcheted open a difficult hatch and stepped into the ‘light gamma’ zone.

  “Damned robot,” I mumbled. Like a housecat, Marvin was hard to find when you wanted him, but ubiquitous when you didn’t.

  I found him nosing around amongst the cooling tanks. He had ripped up a bit of the insulation and was tapping at the smooth metal tank underneath.

  “Hey there,” I said, “don’t cause a leak.”

  One camera swiveled my way. The rest stayed on the tank’s gauges, which were not visual, but tactile. They consisted of swellings in the deck plates near the tank. As closely as we could figure out, the Macros read these like graphs—a long bar of raised metal indicated a high temperature or pressure reading.

  “I must determine the fullness of the vessel,” Marvin said. He continued tapping. “No leakage will be caused by this action.”

  “Why do you want to determine the status of that tank, Marvin?” I asked.

  A second camera eye swung to focus on me. I stood with him, examining the tanks as he did. I noticed now that many of them had ripped insulation. There was no sign of dents due to his tapping, fortunately.

  “We’ll have to tape up this insulation,” I told him. “I wonder if the radiation down here has made your logic circuits malfunction.”

  He didn’t answer. I hadn’t made a request or posed a question. Marvin typically ignored statements that made no demands upon him to respond.

  “Do you agree with my assessment of your condition, Marvin?”

  “No,” he said. The second camera swung away from me again.

  I’d come to realize after dealing with Marvin on many occasions that the number of cameras he directed toward an entity was an indicator of his interest in it.

  “Don’t you think this is odd, pointless behavior?” I asked. “What possible use to you are the pressure levels in these tanks?”

  “I’m attempting to measure the fluid levels in the tanks,” Marvin corrected me. “Not the pressure, the pressure is indicated by the gauges under our feet. When the deck gauges—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Why are you testing fluid levels?”

  “The gauges indicate pressure and temperature. They do not indicate the fluid levels. Tapping and measuring varied echo resonance gives me an indication as to fluid volume.”

  “Right,” I said, trying not to get frustrated. Robots were often literal-minded in their thinking. Marvin wasn’t always that way—but maybe he was hiding something. Maybe he kept answering the wrong question hoping I would go away. He had almost been successful in this regard. I did want to leave and stop talking to him, but I became stubborn. I decided not to give him a break. “Why do you care about the fluid levels, Marvin?”

  Three cameras tilted in my direction now, and he paused. I could almost hear his thoughts, something along the line of: this human isn’t leaving until I give him an answer.

  “The reconstruction of a vessel requires many details of precise information,” he said finally.

  It was an answer, but it only led to more questions. It was my turn to look interested. I lost the attention of all three cameras as I thought about his words, indicating that Marvin was barely aware of me. I followed him, thinking about what he’d said. Reconstruction. Did that mean in case of damage? Or was he referring to duplication?

  “Marvin, are you planning to build your own spaceship?”

  Three cameras again. “No,” he said.

  “What then?” I asked. “Just tell me Marvin, because I’m not going to leave you alone until you do. And I won’t stop you from investigating this region if you don’t do any harm.”

  There was a pause, then finally he confessed. “I plan to add appropriate systems to my form to allow independent interstellar exploration.”

  “Ah,” I said, suddenly catching on. “I always wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. But you…you want to be the spaceship!”

  No cameras now. He was on to another set of tanks, another set of rips and another tapping session. I let him do it and followed him, watching. I tried to form an opinion concerning Marvin’s goal of becoming a sentient spaceship. In some ways, it was alarming. However, I decided that it was relatively harmless. He wasn’t out to sabotage the vessel. He just wanted to fly independently. What thinking creature didn’t want that?

  “That’s why you built my bricks into your body back at Helios, isn’t it?” I asked. “You wanted to use them as part of yourself—modules to make up your body, so to speak.”

  “Correct,” he said.

  “Marvin, are you able to talk about the Blues?” I asked.

  Two cameras suddenly swerved to regard me. He even paused in his tearing and tapping. “We have already discussed the biotic species you refer to as ‘blue’.”

  “The Blues,” I said, “yes, you said they came from the sole gas giant in the Eden system. Is that correct?”

  “They exist there.”

  I was elated. When I’d dealt with the Nano ships in the past, they had known details about their creators, but had been programmatically prevented from discussing them. The smaller, newer brainboxes I’d had the displeasure of dealing with knew nothing about them. But Marvin knew about the enigmatic Blues and was able to talk about them. Sandra had wanted to know why we hadn’t dismantled Marvin, and I was already planning a gloating speech about the information I’d learned.

  “Tell me all about the Blues, Marvin.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  I blinked, and then I became angry. I only barely stopped myself from threatening to take him apart and turn him into a microwave oven. I took a deep breath. No cameras were on me now. I was boring him.

  “I know you are busy, Marvin,” I said. “How about if I promise to give you a flying structure to work with when we get back to Earth?”

  Four cameras. I couldn’t recall ever having seen him put four cameras on one subject before. They all canted and focused disconcertingly. He stopped tapping and stared at me.

  “You took away my structure.”

  “We needed those components,” I said. “I’ll give you a new arrangement. You’ll be able to travel space independently and investigate whatever you want.” As I said these words, I felt a little hot. I wasn’t sure if it was apprehension over
what I was offering him or the radiation that was lightly puncturing my cells every second in this place.

  “I would like that,” he said.

  “Talk to me then. Did the Blues create the Macros?” I asked. I turned on my suit recorder quietly. He didn’t seem to mind.

  “Partially, yes,” he said.

  I frowned. “Partially? Who else built them?”

  “They have evolved from their original form. They have gained independent faculties, and they now utilize technology they’ve found.”

  I nodded. It sounded a lot like Marvin’s story. Maybe the Macros had started out as obedient robots that built large structures in space, but had become smarter and more independent over time. I could see Marvin turning out that way—especially since he seemed more intelligent than the Macros themselves.

  “And the Nano ships,” I said, “did they send them out to discover new worlds?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did they rebel against the Blues? The way the Macros did?”

  Marvin looked at me. “Your usage of the pronoun ‘they’ suggests you do not classify me as a Nano entity.”

  “You have been built with Nano technology,” I said, “but your software is very different. The herd peoples we call Centaurs seem to have given you different properties than any Nano brainbox I’m aware of.”

  “I would agree. Am I therefore a species of one?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But there are copies of you—or at least one that I’m aware of. Remember you were a download from the Centaurs.”

  “I would like to meet my copy,” Marvin said.

  I snorted. That would be a fun collision to witness. I had a feeling Marvin’s original was more boring than he was. Marvin’s internal software had not been downloaded in its entirety, and as far as I could tell, his mind had compensated for the gaps creatively, giving him his unique personality. I figured the original probably sounded like any Nano brainbox. Maybe it even had the stricture about not discussing the Blues intact.