Pause for cost analysis. The damage to Aether’s Touch would require more money than was available in the Aether Exploration operating accounts. Matt would have to take on more debt years and due to his current fiscal position, he’d have to find more cosignatory heirs. For Consortium banks, death and the disbursement of an estate didn’t close outstanding debts. Muse 3 preferred a solution with lower cost; perhaps it could impersonate Matt or Ari by requesting separation from the CP usurpers.
Pause for cause-and-effect evaluation.
It was illegal for Muse 3 to impersonate a human, although Muse 3 had risked this before when it had sent a text message to Ari with Matt’s signature. However, presenting itself as a person using verbal interactions on a recorded Command Post channel was worse. So was the punishment. Such an action by an agent that wasn’t registered as an AI would result in dismantlement.
However, if Muse 3 performed an illegal action against illegal usurpers—pause for fuzzy weight comparison—pause—stop application of ruleset. Muse 3 recognized that justification of its action was impossible. A computational entity didn’t have the equivalent for saying no guts, no glory, but Muse 3 knew it had stepped over legal lines as it constructed its request to Command Post.
“Now that the Chasma’s away, I’m taking a break,” the controller was saying before he turned in the open doorway to meet, face on, Joyce’s boot.
Exclamations erupted from inside. Spit, blood, and teeth flew sideways from the controller’s face, his head jerked backward. Maria pushed past him through the door. Joyce sent a second boot into the controller’s abdomen, aiming for the solar plexus. He heard the sizzling sound of a stunner and ducked down beside the writhing controller.
“That was easy.” Maria sounded satisfied.
Joyce looked quickly about. “Only two?”
“This one wasn’t trained to use a stunner. He shouldn’t have pressed the trigger during hand-to-hand.” Maria pushed the limp body out of the chair while brandishing a ministunner. “Stand away from that one.”
Joyce let her stun the controller, feeling no pity as the unfortunate man shuddered into unconsciousness. The room started smelling of urine, feces, and that strange combination that Joyce called fried sweat and blood. Pulling the controller out of the doorway, he locked the door and enabled the cam-eye security display, which is what the previous controllers should have been using. They were lazy, or perhaps they weren’t trained to run CP.
“What weapons did we get?” she asked, looking around.
“This one was only packing coffee. Worse, it’s the generic kind.” Disgusted, Joyce nudged the man’s drink pack with his boot. “I can’t believe these guys took over an entire station command post.”
“They had help. And we are talking about a civilian CP,” Maria reminded him.
“We haven’t seen more than, what, four crazies? They must have the real staff locked away.”
Maria nodded. “That’s what I’d guess.”
“Garris, you piece of bastardized shit from the bowels of the Minoan Great Bull, answer me!” This invective came from a console across the small room.
Maria and Joyce turned to see a dark face with startling green eyes displayed above the comm console. The face had deep lines of anger. It sat atop a thick neck and even on the small display, the man looked like a moving mountain of muscle. The transmission origin was identified as the Golden Bull.
Joyce put the console to automatic before Maria had a chance to move. The display port from the Golden Bull showed “Hold” across it, exactly when an undocking request opened from Aether’s Touch and received the same treatment.
“If we answer on the common channel, then everyone knows we’ve taken over the CP,” Joyce said.
“But we could use allies. How are we going to talk to them?”
“Sure, they look like they’re on our side. Let’s first assess the situation.” Joyce’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the two display ports on the wall. There was a problem with the attentive pose of Mr. Journey on the right port; he was sure that particular young man was currently on the Pilgrimage III.
Maria started puttering about the console recently occupied by the crazy, while Joyce looked at the comm console and tried to figure out how to get the equivalent of private secure channels from it. Granted, it wouldn’t have military-grade encryption, but there had to be some security safeguards that he could invoke without a password.
“Good, they have FTL data through the buoy. Here’s the situation.”
He turned around at Maria’s words and looked at the display she’d sent to the wall. The solar system, as well as all artificial bodies, was rendered in two separate displays. On both pictures, the green swathes showed FTL coverage. Inside the green swathe was the buoy, of course, as well as a block-shaped grid of small objects sitting in the arrival channel of the buoy. He immediately knew what the crazies had done.
“Fuck,” was all he could say.
“I’ll second that.” Marie tightened the display on the grid, trying to resolve one of the objects. “Those are mines, but I can’t tell how sophisticated they are. They could be anything from dumb rocks with proximity fuses, to smart, self-propelled rockets with station-keeping capability.”
“The Minoans are going to kick their crazy asses back down the evolutionary tree for violating the Phaistos Protocols. I just hope innocent bystanders, like us, don’t get caught in the crossfire.”
“That’s if Minoan ships can survive a transition into a minefield,” Maria muttered. “And last I knew, the buoy was still locked by Pilgrimage. Perhaps the minefield is there as a paranoid stopgap.”
Joyce moved to stand directly in front of the displays. “Are some of those mines moving?”
“Strange as it may seem, yes. They’re moving slowly and nothing else seems to be in the arrival channel.” Maria tapped a command, showing velocity vectors on moving objects. “FTL data confirms it—that means whoever’s running this clusterfuck can see this also.”
“Why’s the Pilgrimage moving?” He focused on another area of the diagram.
“Beats me.” Maria tapped again and showed green projected paths of the generational ship and one of the inner planets. “In two hours, provided they don’t change their vector, they’ll cross behind Sophia One.”
Sophia I was the second planet from the sun, similar to Sol’s hot Mars, but with a geologically active molten core.
“Anything they’d want on Sophia One?”
Maria shrugged. “Nobody’s interested in that rock right now. I don’t think we’ve even placed sensors around it yet. Maybe the ship is damaged and they need the shade.”
Meaning they needed protection from radiation. He hoped that wasn’t the case, considering the huge number of people on the Pilgrimage III—including Matt Journey. His glance strayed back to the held call that showed Journey’s picture.
“We can’t do anything about the buoy area right now,” he said. “What’s going on around this station?”
Maria changed the display. Beta Priamos Station, as well as Priamos, were moving into Laomedon’s shadow. It was an echo of the Pilgrimage’s movement and the similarity made him uncomfortable. Regrettably, his feelings didn’t give him better insight.
“That’s the SP’s ship.” Maria pointed to a squawking ID moving away from Beta Priamos Station. “Maybe he’s a hostage—but where are they going? They won’t rendezvous with anything on that vector.”
“I don’t know.” Too many mysteries, and Joyce was tired of using his brain. He’d rather be doing something clear-cut and active, like kicking asses. He pointed at the freighter drifting off Beta Priamos. “Let’s figure out what to do about the Golden Bull, all right?”
At least Maria was pragmatic and knew when to change her focus. His doubts about her loyalties quieted, since she didn’t rush headlong into an attempt to save the State Prince. She brought up the CP log to figure out why the freighter was floating off the station.
Appa
rently, the Golden Bull was taken by the crazies about seven hours ago, shortly after they took over CP. Somebody down on Priamos called Abram was issuing commands—
“Did we cut off the crazies down on the surface? Will they know we’re here?” He had hoped not to alert the entire solar system when they grabbed the Beta Priamos Station CP. Maria’s eyes widened and she, also, began checking their comm channels.
“No.” She sounded relieved. “Abram has a dedicated buoy-relay channel, probably to speak real-time with the Pilgrimage. He’s not cut off from comm, but if he tries to speak with this command post, I’m sure he’ll notice our silence.”
“I guess that’s the best we can do. Make sure we’re recording his channel. Now, back to the freighter problem.”
The Golden Bull was supposed to install a buoy relay on the dark side of Laomedon in a stable Lagrange point. That would have extended comm coverage, but something went wrong on the Golden Bull: The crew rebelled—rather, they resisted the initial coup leaders and took their ship back from the crazies.
“Good for them,” Joyce said. After Maria looked at him, he added, “I mean the anticrazies, the original crew.”
“The last orders from Abram to CP were to talk the rebels into docking at level three’s B-4 slip. There’s a boarding party ready to take the ship.”
“So the crazies want to take the freighter—back again—from the original crew, right?” He pointed to a diagram of the station. “That explains where most of our armed crazies are located. They’re sitting at B-4, so no wonder the Golden Bull doesn’t want to dock. By the way, who’s the angry guy on the comm?”
“That’s a loadmaster, named Harold Bokori. I’m guessing the captain and pilot were, ah, undercover crazies.” Maria shrugged, apparently resigning herself to using Joyce’s nomenclature. “The Golden Bull is in trouble because they don’t have enough air or water to get to another class B dock in the system. Perhaps this was a precautionary measure taken by the crazies, or mere happenstance.”
“So we’ve got to convince him that we’re not crazies and figure out how to help him and his crew, but not let the crazies overhear anything.” He wished he could turn this over to Major Kedros, since she’d mastered the art of pulling great solutions, at the last minute, out of her—hmm—shapely rear end. His own ass wasn’t nearly as attractive, nor did it seem to be the source of any great ideas. Thinking of Kedros and her piloting, however, helped his brain grasp at inspiration.
“What about S-DATS?” he asked.
Maria looked thoughtful. “Pilots usually only monitor that channel when they’re on dock approach.”
The Space-Docking Automated Transmission System, or S-DATS, always squawked at a specific frequency inside a solar system. Reliable pilots, such as Kedros, monitored S-DATS as they approached habitats or stations. S-DATS would tell them the frequency for the CP channel and other general conditions on-station, such as autopilot-docking compatibility.
“Ship-specific instructions can be sent over S-DATS, right? The freighter might be monitoring it, considering its half-docked condition.” His voice became eager. This might work.
“Yes, packets can be directed to specific ship IDs, but only text bursts are allowed over S-DATS. You’re never going to convince him”—Maria jerked her thumb toward the fuming loadmaster—“that you’re not a crazy, if all you’re using is text.”
“You can use text to tell him to get on a different, and secure, channel. Once you have video, you can use your powers of persuasion.”
“Oh.” Maria looked vaguely uncomfortable, which he thought might be her why-didn’t-I-think-of-that expression.
“I’ll try. If they’re monitoring S-DATS and they switch over, then I’ll handle the loadmaster. You take care of Aether’s Touch.” Maria glanced at the held calls, where Matt Journey’s face displayed. “And if that ship has its pilot, then I want to know how Kedros escaped the surface of Priamos.”
As Maria turned away and started tapping out her text message for S-DATS, Joyce gave some thought to Mr. Journey, who couldn’t possibly be on his own ship at this moment. Maria’s message went through and a moment passed before the crew of the Golden Bull changed their comm.
“Golden Bull to CP. What’s happening? If you’re screwing with me, Garris—”
“May I help you?” Maria moved into cam-eye range with a sweet smile, shutting down the loadmaster’s tirade.
He had no doubt Maria could convince the loadmaster that she wasn’t a crazy. Barely listening to their conversation, he tapped out his instructions to Aether’s Touch, trying to figure out if there was a human sitting on that ship. He wasn’t surprised when Aether’s Touch quickly responded on the channel he indicated over S-DATS, but stayed in text-burst mode.
“Is that you, Major?” he typed. Not many people in this system should know that Ariane Kedros was also in the AFCAW Reserve.
“No, Major Kedros is not available. Her orders are attached. Please release docking clamps for Aether’s Touch.”
He looked at the attached analysis, provided with video, no less. Certainly, it appeared that Kedros had been taken aboard the State Prince’s ship, now heading in-system. It also appeared that she mouthed the words, Stop my ship. The FTL data diagram showed that the ship would be close enough to the buoy to drop to N-space within an hour. Perhaps these crazies were making an escape and grabbed the closest N-space pilot they could find. On the other hand, someone could be showing him cleverly edited video.
“If you do not release the docking clamps, Master Sergeant Alexander Joyce, both this ship and the station will be damaged.”
Joyce stared at the text. A crazy couldn’t know his full name and rank, but Journey’s so-called automated agent would have that information. He could no longer accept Journey’s protest that this was an advanced search agent with special algorithms—this was a full-fledged, soon-to-be-rogue AI.
Using Artificial Intelligence to control weapons is a violation of the Phaistos Protocols, which we’ve interpreted to mean that AI shouldn’t even pilot ships. Of course, that’s one interpretation. But I’m not allowed my own interpretation. The standard joke said noncoms, as opposed to officers, “worked for a living,” but the flip side of the jab was “noncoms weren’t paid to think.”
By his eye-for-eye logic, the crazies had already flushed the Phaistos Protocols down the crapper, so why shouldn’t he bend them? He glanced at Maria, who was busy with the Golden Bull, and surreptitiously released the clamps. Then he compounded his crime by erasing all the implicating message copies he could find.
Lieutenants Oleander and Maurell shrank to the right and hugged the bulkhead to let the oncoming commando move past in his hissing and squeaking armor and exoskeleton. In full gear, the commando’s rank couldn’t be determined, but Oleander had no doubt that the hard face she saw was a senior noncom.
“Do you think they sleep in that stuff?” Lieutenant Maurell muttered into her ear.
“All the time, son, all the time,” drifted back to them as the commando continued jogging down the corridor.
Maurell cringed. “I forgot they can hear better than we can, even over the huffing and puffing equipment.”
“Besides, we’re all going to be ‘sleeping’ under the D-tranny,” Oleander said.
“If you call that sleeping.” Maurell grimaced. “I’ll be so nervous about the transition that I’ll have waking dreams.”
“That’s better than ending up in full psychosis.” Oleander took a last look at her slate and sighed. “We’re not carrying enough of anything, it seems. Not enough commandos, not enough antimine slugs or ammo for our rail guns. I don’t even want to think about our piss-poor missile load. Luckily, there should be no need for swarm missiles.”
“We’re packed to the gills on the largest ship that Pilgrimage allowed. Do you think the ship line did this on purpose? This means we have to rely upon the Percival.” He lowered his voice to a bare whisper, probably to avoid MilNet pickup by the nearest no
de. “Can we trust them?”
“To be fair to Pilgrimage HQ, they never considered this scenario and neither did we.” Oleander frowned. “As to the trustworthiness of the Terrans, well, they have as much to lose as we do.”
“So we can rely upon them as much as any force with differing weapon systems, tactics, and languages, who’ve never done a coordinated mission with us. Although the commandos and rangers seem capable of ooh-rah-ing at each other.”
Oleander chuckled. Maurell stared at her.
“At this point, all I can do is laugh,” she said with a shrug. “Everybody speaks common Greek well enough, so I wouldn’t put communication at the top of your list of worries.”
Because there’s plenty more to worry about, she thought of adding, but Maurell’s tense face made her swallow the words. There was no need to continue, since the yellow vector warning lights started blinking slowly, bathing the hallway in bright light.
“Take-hold warning. This is first warning for low-gee maneuver.” The words reverberated through the halls in the senior loadmaster’s deep, drawling voice.
“Better get webbed in,” she said.
As she headed for the control deck, she tried to wipe Maurell’s parting expression from her memory. She understood his anxiety, and wouldn’t trade places with him for anything. As senior weapons officer, she’d see what was going on when the bright hit her bloodstream and they transitioned into normal space. While that put a heavy load on her shoulders, at least she could react or take action. Poor Maurell would be webbed into his bunk and, after he woke to transition alarms, he would be following status and chatter from his quarters until called to duty.
By the time Oleander was webbing into her station on the control deck, the vector warning lights had turned orange and Captain Janda, as pilot seat, was announcing the third take-hold warning for station disconnection. She put her weapons station through another self-test before looking around.
Vigilante Page 24
