“You are correct. As I wandered the stars, I developed a primitive tactic to take advantage of the stardrive that I had and the Meme did not. I am sure other Ryss warships did the same. I would enter a Meme system and pause, usually near a gas giant. Then, I would select a target, normally the most populous world, take the time to recharge the stardrive, and use it to skip past all defenses to a position above the planet. I would deploy an Exploder, wipe out all higher life, and then fight my way out.”
“That’s why you were so battle-scarred when you arrived,” Absen observed.
“Yes. But in one system I observed the Meme installing a Weapon on the moon of a planet, and deduced their intention, which was to destroy me or anything else that arrived suddenly.”
“It was a Ryss-killer,” Absen said. “Even if they couldn’t stop you bombing the planet, they could hammer you with a laser of enough power to destroy even you, before you could get away.”
“Yes. I believe it was by this method that the Ryss dreadnought raiders were eventually destroyed. Between the Weapon or Weapons in a system, and Guardian Monitors, our marauders would have been picked off one by one while the main Meme fleets captured our systems. The enemy was just too numerous.”
Absen added, “And because their shipbuilding methods do not rely on a machine economy, Ryss wiping out Meme enslaved worlds didn’t actually degrade their war-making capability very much.”
Again that pause, just briefly. “That is very astute. I had not made that connection.” Embarrassment crept into Desolator’s voice. “Then the Ryss used an incorrect strategy.”
“I would have to agree. They failed to identify the foundation of Meme power, which is not their worlds, but rather, their spacegoing warships. Those can feed and reproduce without ever coming near a life-bearing planet. That’s an enormous advantage. But,” Absen waved his index finger like a teacher, “now you have the same advantage. You, Desolator, are the machine version of their living ships, and freed from the restrictions organics placed on you, you can reproduce much like they can.”
“Yes, Admiral. You give me much to think about.”
“Glad to be of service, and thanks for answering my questions.”
“I serve the Ryss, and the Ryss serve humanity.”
Absen waved his hand in the air as if shooing flies. “I appreciate that, but I’d rather have partners – brother warriors, if you will – than servants.”
“You do us all honor, Admiral. Blood debt, remember.”
“I remember.” He walked away from the wall to lay a hand on one of the sarcophagi. “Thank you, my friend. My brother warrior.”
“I thank you, Admiral, my friend, my brother warrior.”
Chapter 7
Two weeks to go until undocking and launch, and Absen couldn’t delay any longer. I’m not immune to procrastination, he thought, especially with an uncomfortable task such as this. But we’ve got to have some time to shake any bugs out while Desolator still has a firm hand on her.
He set the appointment for noon and ate an early lunch, nodding to the commingled crews in the mess. Then he took a deep breath and waved for Tobias to accompany him. “Walk with me this time, Dwayne,” Absen said.
The sharp-eyed man moved up next to his principal, a question on his face. No doubt he wondered at the use of his first name, so rare.
Absen couldn’t exactly explain it, except that he had a feeling this meeting would be momentous, critical, not only for the ship, but perhaps for humanity. “Sometimes a man needs a comrade more than he needs a bodyguard,” the admiral said, staring ahead as he walked.
Tobias cleared his throat. “I understand.”
“What are people saying? About the AI?”
“Less than I expected, sir. Some grumbling, and the usual trash talk, but nothing that worries me overly.” Besides bodyguarding, Tobias and his Stewards kept an eye on the internal security situation, performed investigations, and kept Absen apprised of the scuttlebutt. “I’m not so worried about the naval crew; it’s the Marines that concern me.”
Absen grunted in agreement. “They fought AI-controlled machines that look hardly different from the ones around us.” He waved at a cluster of mechanicals that were working on a lift. “And Desolator wants us to have battle drones aboard, under AI control.”
“I don’t like that idea at all, sir. Too much power in one, ah, person’s hands. Metaphorically speaking, hands.”
Absen nodded. “I know what you mean, but I hate to leave tools behind. I’m inclined to bring them along, but put them in storage under lock and key, with power cells removed. They will only be brought out if needed.”
“Do you think we’ll get in any sort of close action?”
“We’re going to be one ship, alone and unafraid, Chief. We have to be flexible. Better to have them and not need them –”
“– than need them and not have them,” Tobias finished. He looked pointedly around as they crossed the floor of the docking bay, a sectional slab of Conquest’s nose armor looming above them. Laying his hand on its surface just to the right of the huge open portal, he said, “This always amazes me when I see it up close, that humans built this ship.” He sniffed, breathing in the scents of welding and lubricant.
“And then you look at Desolator…” Absen grinned. “I wonder if there are other, bigger ships out there. Like Death Stars? With the Von Neumann approach, all that’s needed is time, materials and knowhow.”
“Makes you think,” Tobias replied, running his fingers around the corner and into the tunnel that led through hundreds of meters of multilayered armor. “Maybe there’s something worse out there than Meme.”
“Maybe. One nemesis at a time, eh?” Absen touched the front of a utility cart hauling a load of boxes. It obediently stopped, and he and Tobias hopped onto the seat in front. “Take us to the Conquest AI, please,” he said aloud.
“Of course, Admiral,” Desolator replied from the cart speaker. While Absen doubted that the intelligence paid close attention to every cart, he’d found that Desolator did seem ever-present near him. The electric vehicle rolled confidently through Conquest’s main larger passageways, machines moving out of its way as if by magic.
Outside a portal it stopped. Two Marines stood watchfully by, and an officer stepped forward, looming over them, huge in full armor. His faceplate snapped upward to reveal the visage of Major Joseph “Bull” ben Tauros, but Absen knew who the man was as soon as he’d seen the blue Star of David painted like a target on his broad chest.
Bull presented arms with his plasma rifle. “ADMIRAL ON DECK!” he roared, and Absen returned the salute.
“At ease. Carry on.” Absen noticed another pair of Marines standing next to a device that looked rather like a bomb. Cables ran from it to mechanisms in their armored fists. He raised his eyebrows at Bull, then looked at the setup.
“Deadman EMP, sir. Both Marines have to keep squeezing those switches, otherwise everything electronic within fifty meters gets fried, including the AI circuits.”
“Good thinking, Major. As you were.” Absen turned toward the chamber.
Inside the opening, deliberately large and without a door, he could see a setup similar to Desolator’s: three coffin-like modules, large Egyptianesque sarcophagi with their heads pointing toward the center. In the middle stood a three-sided obelisk like an obsidian shard. Conduits connected all four pieces of the machine brain to each other, and other fiber-optic cables the size of a man’s wrist lay unconnected in deliberately flimsy brackets.
If his crew had to take the AI down by force, Absen wanted it to be as easy as possible.
On the other hand, he speculated to himself, if and when its consciousness is distributed among nodes around the ship, that fail-safe will not work.
A three-meter viewscreen hung on the wall and Absen could see the noses of holoprojectors poking from a dozen mounts. A dozen people clustered near a console, lab rats and engineers, Commander Ekara standing self-consciously off to the side. When the admi
ral walked in, they spread out in a loose semicircle, all but the power engineer wearing smiles ranging from nervous to ecstatic.
“Welcome, Admiral,” the woman in the center gushed, wiping her hands on her rumpled white coat and then extending one to Absen.
“Thank you, Doctor Egolu.” Absen nodded at Ekara and then shook hands with each of the technicians. “Please, carry on.”
“Yes, sir. It’s coming up on noon.” Egolu checked her watch ostentatiously. “That is when we will let Pandora out of the box,” she tittered.
Out of the corner of his eye Absen saw Ekara stiffen, and he cursed the lack of social judgment that seemed to be the eternal hallmark of pure scientists everywhere. “Nothing so drastic, I trust?” he asked with an edge of sharpness.
Besides, Pandora opened the box. She wasn’t in it.
Egolu’s elation collapsed suddenly, and she shook her head. “No, sir. We’ve run all the tests we can, and the AI has passed them with flying colors. She shows no sign of instability, and she’s progressed over the past months in recognizable developmental stages, just as a human child would. Only, of course, a lot faster.”
“Of course. Can I meet her now?”
“Oh, yes sir.” Egolu waved a hand at a tech on the end, who hastened to turn to the console and input a coded command.
Absen rubbed suddenly sweating palms together. Despite assurances that the new machine brain couldn’t access any systems, every story he’d ever heard about rogue computers, from Hal 9000 to Skynet to Desolator himself, tried to bubble up in his mind. He told himself that the scientists had been interacting with it – her – for weeks now; this was an introduction, a debut, not a Frankenstein’s vivification.
The big screen on the wall flashed for a moment, and then an odd background appeared. White, with striations, a pattern of something like feathers, or an exotic fabric. Then a woman’s face faded in before it, twentyish, a bit sisterly rather than perfect, with slightly dusky skin and dark hair. Fully realized in high definition, she appeared human, down to stray strands and a tiny mole along her jawline. Her eyes seemed to spear him and her lips parted to speak.
“Good afternoon, Admiral Henrich J. Absen,” came a rather ordinary voice from the speakers sitting on the deck. He had expected some kind of super-sexy sound, the female equivalent to Desolator’s deep announcer’s tones. Instead, she sounded more like the girl next door. “Pleased to meet you.”
Absen cleared his throat. “Hello. How are you?” Inane, Henrich…but what else do you say to a woman in a box, who’s not a woman at all?
“Just great, sir. I’m eager to join the team.” Her mouth quirked upward.
Join the team. Desolator has been coaching her. Then he asked a question he had prepared, a small thing, yet he wondered. “What shall we call you? ‘Conquest’?” That name seemed rather non-feminine, not fitting the woman on the screen.
On the screen her smile widened, showing slightly crooked teeth with longish canines. “I spent a bit of thought on that, Admiral. I settled on ‘Michelle.’” Her nostrils flared slightly and she dimpled with impish humor.
“Wow. You are so real,” he breathed, the exclamation drawn involuntarily.
“Thank you. Blame my father. He’s spent the last seven years trying to understand us humans, with limited success I’m afraid.”
“Us humans.” Suddenly Absen burst out laughing. “I like you, Michelle.” Then his face smoothed. “I hope to hell you aren’t just playing us for fools.”
“I understand why you say that, sir. All I can tell you is, anyone can be driven insane, given the right circumstances.”
“I understand that, but not everyone will have the power of a warship at her fingertips.”
“That’s why you installed the fail-safes,” she replied primly.
“Right. During your…education, did you ever see ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’?”
“Of course. I’ve watched thousands of mankind’s movies and read all the stories, as well as those of the Ryss and Sekoi. But your name’s not ‘Dave.’” Her cheek twitched.
“Funny. Then you have some idea of what we fear, and why we never built AIs to control our ships, no matter how efficient they might be.”
Michelle sighed. “I get it, I do. All I can say is, you’ll have to decide how much to trust me, and how much to hook me up to. I can be an advisor, or a manager, with everything routed through officers, but that would not be a good use of your tools.”
Absen laughed. “You’ve been studying me too, it seems.”
“Of course.”
“So tell me…why ‘Michelle’?”
“Because ‘Michael’ isn’t a girl’s name?”
Absen thought furiously for a moment. “As in, the archangel? Heaven’s commanding general?”
“Correct, Captain my Captain. Will you allow me to be connected to the holoprojectors?”
Absen turned to Doctor Egolu. “Are they isolated?”
“Yes, sir,” the chief scientist replied. “This room is shielded from everything else on the ship, unless we connect it. We are even running off a separate fuel cell.”
“Then go ahead.” He gestured at the fiber-optics.
Two of the white coats eagerly fitted a cable into a socket, and the tech at the console tapped his controls. The projectors lit up as power flowed to them, then a dome of light and a test pattern appeared for a moment before fading, leaving a figure standing on the deck.
Demure instead of terrifying, nevertheless the construct of light standing before him radiated a kind of subdued majesty, a magnetism as undeniable as it was ephemeral. Absen had expected something like Raphaela, the Blend that he had left behind in Earth’s system. Despite the shape of a woman, instead of sophistication, this one gave off warmth. Where Rae had been stunning and intimidating and heartrendingly attractive, Michelle seemed welcoming, matter-of-fact, sisterly.
Absen wondered how much was artifice and how much was…could one say ‘natural’?
Dressed not in an angel’s toga, rather she wore an EarthFleet naval warrant officer’s uniform, with a cuirass of body armor, a sidearm and a dagger.
And wings. Mustn’t forget the wings, Absen marveled, watching them flutter behind her head. Like huge smooth swan’s pinions, they loomed white and pure, with golden highlights.
The lab rats smiled knowingly at his reaction. Obviously they had seen this before. He forced a smile onto his face, made himself not be irritated with them for their little surprise.
“Warrant Officer First Michelle Conquest reports for duty, sir,” she said, folding the wings and snapping off a precise salute.
Absen gravely returned it. “Glad to have you. Might want to lose the wings and dagger, though. Shall we say, formal occasions only?”
“Yes, sir. As you wish, sir.” The wings and knife faded from view, leaving a rather ordinary-looking WO1.
Absen thought her choice, or perhaps the choice of the team that prepped her, was clever. A warrant would be nominally subordinate to all officers, but outrank all of the enlisted. Warrants were normally technical experts, their license to command limited to their specialties, usually small teams. Yet they were highly respected, often promoted from among the brightest of the rank and file and given special training. They occupied a neither-fish-nor-fowl niche that gave them flexibility and the respect of all.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
The question seemed to give Michelle pause, and her eyes narrowed. “I’m not a Vulcan, sir.”
“Glad you got the reference. But you are a machine.”
Michelle’s lower lip quivered slightly and her eyes glistened with tears. At that moment she seemed pitifully young, despite the appearance of a woman of twenty, and Absen had to remind himself of what he’d been told – that this being, this intelligence, all of perhaps two months old, was still a child in some ways. He felt ashamed of himself for his harshness.
Michelle took a breath as if to calm herself. “I have a mechanical br
ain instead of an organic one, but my father designed my mind to be as human as possible, including my emotions. I can’t help the body I was born with, or the fact that I can never really be like the rest of you.” An edge of bitterness seemed to lurk beneath her words.
Absen struggled to remind himself that this was all programming, software made to emulate human attitudes. But then again, what else is a human mind? Where is the true line? These themes have all been explored in science fiction, and intellectually I know them all, but it’s a bit different actually coming nose to nose with a sentient computer that looks like a human being.
And that’s where I’ve started to go wrong. She has on the uniform, but she’s really never even been to basic training. We’ll have to fix that, starting now, even if it does sting a bit.
“Ms. Conquest, if you really want to be an officer in EarthFleet, you will have to grow a thicker skin. I am your commanding officer, not your friend, and I am not at all sure you have earned that rank. Have you been through some kind of training, an academy, a warrant officer’s course?”
“I’ve downloaded every bit of information available about –”
“That’s not what I asked. Have you experienced military training?” Absen glanced over at the team of scientists. Egolu gave her head a little shake.
“No, sir,” Michelle said miserably.
Absen’s voice firmed to iron. “Then you will delete those warrant bars from your collar and replace them with candidate’s pips, right now. Bull!”
The major bolted to Absen’s side, his armored boots clattering on the deck. “Sir!”
“Get a scratch team together from anyone available that has had experience as a military trainer, and put together a course. As of now, you are in charge of turning Cadet Conquest here into the warrant officer she aspires to be. You are also in charge of this team of experts, but don’t take any guff from them, and don’t be easy on your trainee. If she’s to control ship systems, she has to be as tough and reliable as any other officer. More so. Got it?”
“Aye aye, sir.” Bull turned to the hologram. “Adjust your uniform, Cadet, like the admiral said. From now on you will keep your eyes caged and you will speak when you are spoken to, is that clear?”
Tactics of Conquest (Stellar Conquest) Page 6
